Less than a week since the race in Bahrain, Formula 1 was back in the Middle East at the Corniche street circuit in Jeddah for the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, where last year, Fernando Alonso, in the AMR23 briefly led the race just after the start and finished on the podium. Could we see another impressive drive from either of the 2 AM F1 drivers this year?
The Free Practice sessions on Thursday looked quite solid, even though Lance Stroll survived a brush with the wall early on in the first session. He recorded the 9th fastest lap and Alonso the 2nd fastest. Both drivers improved on that in the later session, with Alonso finishing top of the timesheets & Stroll 6th fastest. Commenting afterwards and perhaps managing expectations, the 2-time World Champion said, “I feel good. Obviously, it’s only free practice & as we saw in Bahrain we are faster in practice than we are in Qualifying.”
In the final Free Practice session the following day, he had recorded the 3rd fastest lap with approximately 10 minutes remaining, when Zhou Guanyu in the Sauber crashed & the session was red-flagged. Comfortable with his practice during the session Alonso didn’t go out again, although many other drivers did & recorded faster times. He ended up 6th with Stroll just behind him in 7th.
Later in the day, Qualifying commenced under the floodlights in the Arabian night and both drivers finished exactly where they did in Q1 in Bahrain, solidly in the top 10 – Lance 2nd ahead of Fernando, 5th. In Q2, there was a brief moment of drama when Hulkenberg lost power in his Hass on the track, but the session was restarted and Alonso got his AMR24 into 2nd place, just 44/100ths of a second behind Verstappen. He ended up 3rd after the decision was made not to go out again for a final lap, but to preserve the fastest tyres for Q3. Stroll did go out but he backed out of his ‘hot lap’ and finished 9th. On their 1st runs in Q3 Alonso managed to get his car up to 3rd and Stroll was 8th. Every driver came into the pits for brand new soft tyres on which to attempt their final runs and despite some of his best sector times of the day, Alonso finished just 0.039 of a second behind Perez in the Red Bull, who was 3rd. Stroll finished 10th.
Race day was on Saturday again and it was good to see that there was a bit of a mixed-up grid, with a Ferrari splitting the Red Bulls at the front, followed by Alonso. It was also encouraging that he was ahead of both the McLarens & Mercedes. Everyone got off the start cleanly and Alonso seemed to get a nose in front of Perez, but Perez was faster round the first turn and stayed in front. Alonso then had to fend off Oscar Piastri in the McLaren behind him but was overtaken by him on the main straight at the end of lap 2. Although Alonso managed to keep within half a second of Piastri and had the benefit of DRS the McLaren was just simply faster down the straights than the AM and Alonso could not keep up. Meanwhile, although Stroll had moved up to 9th, he crashed out of the race spectacularly on lap 7 after hitting a wall going into one of the corners, then slid out of control straight over the track and crashed into a barrier on the other side at an estimated speed of 150 mph. He was unhurt but clearly the car was ruined. This required the safety car to be deployed which meant the debut of the brand new 656bhp Aston Martin Vantage on the circuit! It led the pack for 3 laps (see photo), during which most of the leading drivers, including Alonso, came in for fresh hard tyres to take them to the end of the race. Coming out of his pit slot, Perez was released straight into Alonso’s path (judged later to be unsafely for which he got a 5 second penalty). Alonso came out 7th & the race got back underway on lap 10. By lap 13, Piastri was out of range of Alonso utilising DRS and on the tail of Hamilton, with whom he battled for some 20 laps. It was then a bit of a solitary drive for Alonso. He stayed in 7th, 3.5-4 seconds behind Piastri and ~1.5 seconds ahead of Russell until lap 35 when Norris & Hamilton came in for their only pit stop, which resulted in Alonso moving up to 5th which is where he stayed until the finish on lap 50. Max Verstappen won the race – the 56th of his career.
Commenting after the race Fernando said “I'm very happy with finishing fifth in today's race. I think finishing in front of one McLaren, one Ferrari and both Mercedes is a great result for the team and probably around the maximum we can achieve at the moment.” Lance sounded a rather more subdued tone, "It was a disappointing way to conclude a good weekend. I’d been pushing really hard in those opening laps – the cars around us were definitely faster and the tyres were already struggling. I was trying to build a gap and just clipped the wall”.
One couldn’t finish this article without mentioning the star driver of the day, 18 year-old Oliver Bearman. This young lad was informed on Friday morning that he would be standing in for Carlos Sainz at Ferrari after the Spaniard was diagnosed with appendicitis and had to be operated on.
It was a memorable & mature debut for him in which he scored points for the Team by securing P7, putting in an impressive drive in which he carried out several overtakes & finished safely ahead of Lando Norris and Lewis Hamilton. Full marks & many congratulations to him – I’m sure we will be seeing him in a race team again soon.
The next race will be the Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne in two week's time which I will be attending -my first grand prix race of 2024.