Fernando Alonso holds a “good feeling” over Aston Martin’s potential prospects in Formula 1’s Monaco Grand Prix, despite the team’s struggles across recent rounds.
Aston Martin has carried on from where it ended last season as the fifth-fastest team, but aspirations to maintain speed with the leading quartet unravelled at Imola.
The Silverstone-based squad introduced a sizeable upgrade package last weekend; however, Alonso endured a nightmare weekend that turned into a testing session.
Alonso crashed in FP3 and sustained a premature Q1 elimination, with Aston Martin boss Mike Krack suspecting the updates made its AMR24 “more difficult to drive”.
But the Spaniard contends that Monaco’s unique circuit characteristics mean that competitiveness on past venues won’t have an overriding bearing on this weekend.
Asked whether Monaco could be better suited to Aston Martin’s car, Alonso said: “Let’s see, I think Monaco is very unique.
“I came here with very competitive cars and we were not very competitive and vice versa. I came here with difficult cars and then that weekend I was P5 or P6.
“So I think it’s a little bit unknown you need to get confidence in the car in FP1 that will build the momentum into qualifying and then the race is just a different story.
“So I think it’s a little bit unknown this weekend.
“Things are so close between all the teams that here you can be in the top five or out of Q1 with again two-tenths of a second and this is a little bit difficult to predict at the moment.
“But I don’t know, I have a good feeling this weekend.”
Aston Martin started last season as the closest contender to Red Bull’s dominance, with Alonso coming close to beating Max Verstappen to pole position in Monaco.
However, the two-time F1 champion has denied that he would welcome wet conditions to compensate for Aston Martin’s less competitive predicament 12 months on.
“I prefer dry, even if I’m a little bit less competitive,” Alonso admitted. “Driving in Monaco in the wet, it’s not very nice, but now let’s see. I think we are ready for everything.”
Meanwhile, Alonso has pointed to his strong one-lap efforts earlier in the season and Monaco’s status as being hard to overtake at as a reason he harbours confidence.
“No doubt that last year maybe we had higher hopes than this year, or the car seemed strong in the slow-speed corners in 2023,” he reasoned.
“So Monaco was in the calendar as an opportunity for us but this year you don’t know.
“I think we’ve been up and down so far we’ve been qualifying extremely well, P3 in China like one month ago.
“So, if we can repeat that kind of laps on Saturday and the tyres are ready and hot for that first performance lap,
“Then on Sundays, less of a problem, the degradation of the pace, all these kind of things. So we’re still optimistic that we can do a strong weekend and I’m really ready for that.”
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