Despite a few small upgrades added to the AMR24s and a hope that the momentum from Montreal would continue, it was not to be. The Free Practice sessions didn’t start that well when a piece of wing came off Alonso's car and the session had to be red flagged. The team worked swiftly to ensure he could go out again for some more practice runs and focus on gathering data across different tyre types, which his teammate Stroll was also doing. Ominously, Alonso ended up 9th fastest in FP1 and Stroll was 14th. There was no improvement in FP2, with Alonso only going 14th fastest, with Stroll 18th. Both drivers were complaining about severe tyre degradation and a lack of grip. For the final Practice session on the Saturday, Alonso enjoyed a stronger session, managing to go 9th fastest again. Stroll meanwhile, who had got himself embroiled in a spat with Hamilton which was investigated by the Stewards, was only 17th. They issued a reprimand to Stroll for deliberately driving into Hamilton during the session after Stroll "admitted that he wanted to express his displeasure to the other driver by pulling over on him at the exit", but they adjudicated his driving to be "erratic not dangerous" and no penalty was issued.
A few hours later, Qualifying got underway and Stroll was one of the drivers who went out early in order for the Team to evaluate how much the impact of the damage to the sidepod of his AMR24 there was on the car’s overall performance, due to the contretemps he had with Hamilton, and which the mechanics had tried to repair in the interim period. But the time he recorded was about a second off the pace. Soon after, Alonso went out on his first run & posted the 6th fastest time. Stroll’s initial time was dropping down the timing sheets and with 5 minutes to go he was 13th, with Alonso’s time slumping to 11th. Fortunately, on his last run Stroll survived the cut, as he posted the 15th fastest time & went through to Q2. Alonso improved his position slightly, finishing 9th fastest. The Team sent Stroll out early again at the beginning of Q2 and he had a rather scrappy lap, almost losing it at turn 7. His time of 1 minute 13.6 seconds was slower than the slowest car in Q1. To emphasise the point, Alonso completed his first lap in 1:12:555 & put himself in provisional 10th place, just inside the top 10 cut-off. With 5 minutes to go both AMs were in the drop zone; Alonso 12th, Stroll 14th and although both AM drivers managed to haul their cars up the order, other drivers improved on their times as well, resulting in both AMs failing to go through to the final Qualifying session - Alonso 11th, just 0.019 of a second away from getting through to Q3 and 1/10th of a second from posting the 6th fastest time. Stroll ended up 14th. Just to emphasise that Formula 1 isn’t one-sided and boring, there was yet another new pole-sitter, Lando Norris in the McLaren – his first pole of the season. How would he get on against Max Verstappen starting alongside him on the front row?
For the race on Sunday, the starting order would alter slightly, as Perez was carrying a 3-place grid drop penalty from the race in Canada, meaning Alonso would start 10th, with Perez just behind him. Stroll would still start 14th. The race start is one of the longest of the Formula 1 circuits – 600 meters to the 1st corner. This allows the cars behind the front row to benefit from an enormous amount and long period of slipstream. So it proved, as Norris was just a split second slower off the start, allowing Verstappen to steal through on the inside, but more impressively, Russell managed to gain full advantage of the slipstream and sneaked into the lead on the outside going into the 1st corner. Unfortunately for Alonso however, he was right behind Piastri going into the 1st sequence of corners and had to take avoiding action when Piastri braked in front of him, requiring Alonso to swerve off the track, probably assisted with a touch from the car behind, so as to avoid hitting Piastri and returned to the track up an escape road, having lost 2 places. Shortly after, on lap 2, Stroll overtook Bottas, to put himself up to 13th, behind Alonso. At the front, Verstappen caught and passed Russell for the race lead on lap 3. Back to the Aston Martins and Alonso was still struggling for grip after another off-track excursion, going wide & getting 2 tyres into the gravel and was passed by Stroll on lap 7 and then by Bottas at the start of Lap 8, down the long start-finish straight. On lap 10, Stroll was in 12th & Alonso in 14th, but then many of the midfield drivers and some of those further up started to come into the pits for their first tyre changes. This allowed Stroll to advance up the running order, all the way to 5th spot, with Alonso 7th by lap 17. However, they did not stay there long, as with the advantage of fresher tyres those faster cars soon passed the Aston Martin drivers and they then had to make pit stops of their own, first of all Stroll on lap 18, who came out 17th and then Alonso, on lap 20, who came out 16th, 2 places behind Stroll, who had managed to gain 3 places on his fresher tyres in the interim period. For a while, Magnussen in a Haas car, was within a second of Stroll and within DRS usage range, but Stroll managed pull out to 1.2 seconds ahead and out of that crucial DRS range on the next lap. 2 laps later Magnussen himself was within Alonso’s clutches and got passed on the long start finish straight for 15th place. By the halfway stage of the race (lap 33), Stroll had managed to pass Bottas on lap 26 and Alonso did the same a lap later, meaning they were in 13th & 14th positions. Stroll had to come into the pits again on lap 38 for a final set of fresh hard tyres to take him all the way to the race finish. He managed to progress up the order, partly benefiting from the fresher tyres and also due to other cars coming in for their final stops. However, when Alonso came into the pits on lap 46 for his final set of fresh hard tyres, he managed to come out 13th, less than a second ahead of Stroll, meaning Stroll had been caught behind some slower cars whilst trying to overtake them. At the front, there had been a change of lead when Verstappen had to come in for fresh tyres on lap 44 and Norris took over, but he had to come in for his final tyre change so that with 15 laps to go Norris was less than 6 seconds behind Verstappen and hunting him down. On lap 53 Alonso was within DRS range of Zhou in a Sauber and passed him a lap later for 12th spot. As the chequered flag came down on race winner Max Verstappen, he was just over 2 seconds ahead of Lando Norris and the Aston Martins trailed in more than a lap behind, Alonso 12th and Stroll 14th, meaning no points would be scored by the Team at this race.
It had clearly been a difficult weekend and race for the drivers and team. Lance Stroll said “a lot of the race was spent managing tyre degradation. We weren't competitive enough this weekend, so we have work to do ahead of Austria to find some more performance." Alonso was more disheartened, “It was disappointing not to score any points this weekend in front of the home fans. The whole weekend we have struggled with our pace and we suffered with high tyre degradation.” Mike Krack, Team Principal’s view was “It was a race to forget at a track which exposed our known weaknesses. We understand the areas to remedy but we must be patient as they won't come overnight.” Given that it is less than a week until the next race, the Austrian Grand Prix in Spielberg, we should not expect much change in such a short space of time, especially as that is a circuit that is similar in characteristics to Barcelona and may also expose the AMR24s weaknesses.
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