The Spanish Fernando Alonso (Aston Martin), double Formula One world champion finished eleventh in the sprint and comes fourth this Sunday in the São Paulo Grand Prix (Brazil), the penultimate of the World Championship. The Asturian declared at the Interlagos circuit that "hopefully" they can "fight for the podium: and if not, for the 'top 5'." "The pace was good, so we stayed with that; because after this morning's incident the day was a little lost," said Alonso, in a second youth at 42 years old.
This was Alonso's opinion at the end of the day about the incident with the Frenchman Esteban Ocon (Alpine), who took his Aston Martin ahead of him in the first round of the reduced qualification ('sprint shootout'), causing a series of damage to the front. left front of the AMR23 that prevented him from starting in SQ2; so he faced the sprint from fifteenth position on the grid.
That incident, which conditioned everything that came after, is the umpteenth confrontation between Alonso and Ocon. The maneuver was clear, Alonso was on a slow lap and Ocon on a fast one while both went through turn 6, the Frenchman stepped on the curb and lost control of the Alpine with a countersteering wheel, just enough to not be able to straighten it in the inside lane and run over the Aston Martin 14. “Fernando is an idiot,” the Frenchman cried as soon as he crashed into the protections.
The Frenchman claimed that Alonso was to blame, when it was evident that he had lost control of the car. "People say I lost the car, but I didn't lose it, I made corrections like Norris, who took pole. What happened is that Fernando turned left in the middle of the corner, he didn't leave enough space and in the end we crashed," Esteban told the media in the Interlagos paddock.
Alonso's version was completely different: "I think he lost the car a little and it's one of those moments in which you are in the wrong place at the wrong time," said Alonso, who does not want to give importance to anything that comes from the Ocon box. "Whenever there is an Alpine you have to be extra careful, they must think that the car is narrower than it is," he ironized.
