Fernando Alonso says that his Aston Martin Formula 1 team is still 'two or three tenths' off McLaren and Mercedes on race pace despite a strong performance in Jeddah.
At the season-opener in Bahrain, Alonso qualified sixth but slipped to ninth behind the Mercedes and McLaren drivers in the race, finishing 74 seconds adrift of winner Max Verstappen. Alonso qualified fourth for the Saudi Arabian GP, but he soon lost a place to Oscar Piastri's McLaren. He then remained in fifth place for the duration of the race, successfully staying in front of the Mercedes of George Russell and finishing 35 seconds behind Verstappen.
'It was stressful because I was pushing and Oscar was just pulling away,' he said. 'And George was significantly faster behind, so I was thinking, okay, it's 43 laps to the end after the safety car. 'In FP2 we normally do nine or ten laps on the long run. So to do 42 was, let's say, an unknown territory in terms of tyre age. So yeah, I was just making sure that the strategy was still a one-stop, and we didn't change the plan.