Fernando Alonso was left “speechless” as poor luck across the weekend denied him an “easy podium” at the Australian Grand Prix.
The double world champion had one of the quickest cars in practice and the early part of qualifying but a hydraulics problem saw him crash in Q3 meaning he started 10th.
Then, in the race, two Safety Cars saw him run as high as P4 but with the field bunched up, he would fall out of the points after his pit stop.
Finally, graining issues on his new tyres meant Alonso had to stop again, resulting in a lowly P17 finish.
“Speechless, to be honest,” he said of his emotions post-race.
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“It’s hard to accept that everything is going in the wrong way at the moment, but it’s only three races in the championship, still 20 to go.”
Indeed, Alonso is hopeful that, at some point, his current poor rub of the green will improve.
“Luck, I guess, is going to compensate sooner or later in the 23 races and we will be on other occasions lucky, I guess so,” he added.
“But at the moment we lost P6 in Saudi guaranteed. Here I think we were looking for P6 or P7 before the Safety Car.
“And obviously, if we take into account yesterday, the podium today was very easy with Max [Verstappen] out.
“Beating George [Russell] to the podium, I think we were quite fast, a lot faster than the Mercedes in this circuit, so we lost an opportunity.”
Explaining his problems with the new tyres, Alonso blamed running in the dirty air as he emerged in a queue behind Lance Stroll.
“It was difficult,” he said. “We exited the pitstop and there were four cars in front of us with a DRS train.
“If they are one-by-one you pass them, but when they are four and they all open the DRS, it was impossible. So we killed the tyres.
“As I said, it’s tough but it is the way it is. We cannot look back, only look in front of us, and Imola is another opportunity.”