accustomed to answering Alonso He appeared before the Spanish media with a question: “Who is the pilot of the day?”. According to the votes of F1.com was Lewis Hamiltonwho touched Magnussen at the start, punctured to the back of the peloton and climbed back to fifth. The Spaniard was not far behind, from the twentieth on the grid (penalty to change the engine) to ninth under the checkered flag. Eleven positions in a circuit that traditionally does not facilitate overtaking and under extreme conditions, as he explained to AS: “It was complicated, such high temperatures don’t help the tires much grip and the car, and there was more wind than the other days. It was hard to understand how much you could push on the tyres, because you did one a little bit faster and suddenly you had three laps of overheating.
On strategy: “We passed eight cars because we were out of position, it’s easy to overtake in that group of the Williamses, with all due respect, until you stall. We had to stop earlier because we had the ALpha Tauri, McLaren and Ocon . I took three off with the stop, it was a coin toss decision because it could be stretched, yes, but we also did an ‘undercut’. The tire wear was difficult and we had a regular ‘pit-stop’, the last one, but it wouldn’t have changed much. We started last, sacrificing the weekend, because we had to penalize Baku and we didn’t want to start 17th here and 20th in Baku. We sacrificed this and took points, when other times you start fifth or sixth on the grid and don’t score points. The world is upside down, but welcome.”
“We need to improve”
“If I start in a normal position, we would have been eighth and ninth, which is our position. I don’t think the car was particularly good, because we were where we usually fight in the race, with Bottas and McLaren. In qualifying sometimes we are ahead, we were even close to Mercedes but now I don’t think so. We need a normal weekend, well, to get rid of the bad taste in our mouths, because in this one, even being ninth, I think I could have been seventh”, explained Fernando, who does not hide that improvements will be needed to withstand the race of developments: “The good thing is that this year they are public, you see the piece of paper, on some Fridays we have too little. We have to improve in that aspect, but I’m calm, quite a few things will come”.