Fernando Alonso has suggested that Alpine were quicker than Mercedes at the Australian Grand Prix and were unlucky not to finish on the podium as a welcome reward for their efforts. George Russell eventually managed to sneak into third place ahead of Lewis Hamilton and behind Sergio Perez and race winner Charles Leclerc at the end of the 58-lap contest on the streets of Melbourne.
Russell was gifted his first podium finish as a Mercedes driver when Max Verstappen was forced to retire with a mechanical problem during the closing stages of the race. Alonso was adamant that Alpine could have been up there on another day, though, after performing better than Mercedes over the course of the weekend as a whole.
“I think today we could have been on the podium, to be honest,” Alonso told Sky Sports F1. “If we qualified third or fourth yesterday, with Max out, George in the podium.
“I think we’ve been a little bit faster than the Mercedes this weekend. So we lost that opportunity here, also in Jeddah where we were doing a very good race.
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“So this is the way it is at the moment, a little bit unlucky. Twenty races to go, in some of them I will be super lucky, I guess.”
Meanwhile, it remains to be seen whether Mercedes will be able to iron out their ongoing performance issues before F1 returns to the track at Imola in a fortnight’s time. The Silver Arrows find themselves in second place in the Constructors’ Championship standings but have lacked pace since pre-season testing, with their current position largely due to Red Bull’s poor reliability.
Hamilton was left aggrieved by his fourth-placed finish in Melbourne after losing track position when Russell took the opportunity to pit for new tires under the safety car. The seven-time champion appeared to question Mercedes’ strategy via team radio shortly before the end of the race but later revealed that he was struggling to prevent his engine from overheating and was left unable to push at the level of his team-mate as a result.
DON’T MISS
“I couldn’t fight for third because the engine was overheating, so I had to back off,” said Hamilton. “But as I said, we bagged as many points as we could as a team, so that’s great.
“This weekend, we’ve had so many difficult moments with the car. So to get ourselves fifth and sixth in qualifying and to progress like we have, we definitely didn’t expect third and fourth.
“George did a great job today, I saw a bit of him racing Perez and I wish I could have been in it, but we’ll take these points and keep pushing.”
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