Fernando Alonso admitted a lack of trust and confidence to push his Alpine after only qualifying 15th for the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix.
The double world champion finished almost half a second down on teammate Esteban Ocon in Q2, as he was unable to repeat his top 10 performance from Saturday in Bahrain.
And reflecting on his performance, Alonso simply admitted the pace wasn’t there from him.
“I was not good enough, that’s probably the easiest answer,” he told Formula1.com. “I felt good in the car, I felt fast, the balance was good, but by the time I crossed the line, it was not good enough to finish in the top 10.
“So I will analyse it. I will try to improve next time and get better.”
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The big story in these early races, with reduced testing and practice, is how new drivers or those that changed teams are still adapting to the 2021 cars.
And Alonso does think that makes a much bigger difference on a layout like Imola than in Bahrain.
“I need to understand better what is the limit of the car,” he explained. “In difficult tracks or in demanding circuits like this one you need to have a minimum trust level in the car, because these old-school tracks require some trust in the car and confidence to push the limit while qualifying arrives.
“Maybe I’m not into that level yet, but I will try to improve for the next one.”
Looking ahead, Alonso added: “The race is tomorrow, the points are gained tomorrow. In Bahrain, Saturday was good, on Sunday we had to retire the car, so hopefully here it is the other way around.
“Saturday so-so, tomorrow we are going to score points.”
“It’s difficult. If you want to start high on the grid it’s at Imola because it’s very difficult [to overtake],” he noted.
“But at the same time, with so many things happening in practice, a lot of red flags, a lot of incidents, it’s a place that creates a lot of drama sometimes in the race, so let’s be there and try to take every opportunity. It’s going to be a hard race, we know that, but we will try anyway.”
As for Ocon, he just scrapped into Q3 for Alpine and believes he got the most from the package he currently has.
“I think it’s been a very good, straightforward session, which is what we needed looking at Bahrain, which was more tricky with yellow flags and all that,” the Frenchman commented.
“The next thing is that I think we maximised the potential today. I think P9 was the maximum that we could have done, the other ones [in Q3] were a little bit quicker than us and out of reach.
“The upgrades that we brought this weekend gave us confidence, the car felt good in all three sessions. And to be fair, I had a lot of fun out on this track, so that was good.”