Aston Martin explain call which led Alonso to claim “you never get it right with me”

Fernando Alonso’s criticism of a crucial strategy call by his team was played on the world feed during the British Grand Prix.

The frustrated driver fell from sixth place to tenth when he made his first pit stop. Meanwhile his team mate Lance Stroll rose from 12th to fourth.

“All the people that we lost places [to, do] they have worse tyres or [did] we just lose places for fun?” he asked his race engineer Chris Cronin.

After he was told only one car had got ahead of him by staying out, meaning the others had all successfully jumped ahead of him, Alonso replied: “Crazy how you never get it right with me.”

Stroll’s unusual strategy saw him make two pit stops before Alonso made his first. He came in on lap six during a Virtual Safety Car period to swap his intermediate tyres for soft slicks as the track briefly dried.

He gained a lot of time at that phase of the race, then came in for another set of intermediates on lap 10 when the conditions deteriorated again. That was one lap before most drivers and allowed Stroll the ‘undercut’ several of them.

Aston Martin team principal Andy Cowell said the team decided from the beginning to split their drivers’ strategies because they were so far apart from each other on the grid.

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“The way we were looking at it this morning when we were doing the strategy review was that Fernando’s P7, Lance is down at P18, there’s sort of two strategy games to play and so to take a different approach,” Cowell told media including RaceFans. “Now, after the race, with our hindsight T-shirts on, the Monday morning coaching where we can go ‘Actually, what would the ideal race have been?’

“That was for Fernando to mimic exactly what we did with Lance at that point and maybe that could have done better.”

Alonso suffered a further setback when he made an early switch back to slicks later in the race but found the track was still too wet.

“We were the first team to go onto the slick tyres, we probably went too soon there,” said Cowell. “On the medium we lost tyre temperature and the performance dropped away and then Fernando fought his way back.”

He said the team understood Alonso’s criticism came in the heat of the moment. “I think all of us that have been in this competitive world for a long time know that sometimes in the environment, in the cockpit, you can’t see what’s going on overall and you’re always frustrated when a series of pit stops plays out and you’ve dropped the odd place, you want to know why. So we’ve heard every single driver come up with those messages and it feels personal, but it’s not.”

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2025 British Grand Prix

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