Alonso postive despite tough Bahrain test: "There is a step forward"
F1 News
Despite what seemed like a tough test for Aston Martin, Fernando Alonso has said that "there is a step forward compared to last year's car". The British team did look like they were struggling in Sakhir during the three days of winter testing, completing the least amount of laps out of all the teams, except for Red Bull Racing, which may just set the tone for a rocky start of the 2025 season in Australia.
Alonso first joined Aston Martin in 2023 which saw him finish fourth in the drivers' standings on 206 points. However, there was a bit of a regression in his team's performance in 2024, resulting in the 43-year-old's fall from P4 to P9 in the space of a year.
In two weeks the 2025 Formula 1 season is due to start with the Australian Grand Prix, which may be the first indicator of where all the teams stand going into the championship, both in terms of race pace and over a lap. It was not a smooth winter test for Aston Martin around the Bahrain International Circuit, but despite that, there are a lot of positives for Alonso.
Alonso and Aston Martin "relatively happy"
At the start of the final day of testing, Aston Martin unexpectedly had to make changes to the set-up: "Very early in the morning, [the conditions] go quickly to bad. The last part of the day goes quickly to good. So the only stable part is the slow session of it. We have to wait. We have some positives in the car. We're not going to get into the details," Alonso explained to GPblog and others.
"But the data and the correlation seem good. There is a step forward compared to last year's car. There are some negatives as well, like all the things that we need to fix and get better for Australia for later in the season. We are relatively happy knowing that it's extremely tight in the midfield. We will have to do perfect weekends if we want to score points. But this was not a surprise and we will try to get better throughout the season," Alonso concluded.
This article was created in collaboration with Estéban den Toom
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