MADRID, 27 May. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Spanish driver Fernando Alonso (Alpine) hopes that the Monaco Grand Prix can start “on the right foot” this weekend, the seventh round of the Formula 1 World Championship, and has acknowledged that they are “curious” to know where they are with the car, in addition to assuring that they hope to “increase confidence” with a good job in the Principality.
“We are curious to see where we are, we don’t have a clear answer. We have to increase confidence, have a car that allows you to push, and at the moment nobody knows if we have this car. We have the free today, we no longer have the day off, tomorrow we have the classification and we need to start off on the right foot,” he said at a press conference.
In this sense, the Asturian believes that the fact that there is no day off on Friday at the Monegasque event is “more logical”. “It’s more logical to have a normal weekend. Normally in Monaco you have that Friday off and you think a bit about the car, about the set-up… The track evolves a lot with the categories on Friday and you arrive on Saturday and it’s a new track. We will miss that,” he explained.
In addition, the two-time world champion, who now resides in the Principality, recognized that racing there is almost like a Grand Prix at home. “I’ve been racing here for 18 or 19 years, so it’s a familiar thing. This place doesn’t change much from one year to the next and that’s an advantage. You feel good coming back here and I hope that with this generation of cars we will have different challenges, because they are heavier and they don’t perform as much in slow corners, maybe the changes of direction are more vague, everything you need in Monaco they don’t have. But it’s the same for everyone, “he stressed.
In another order of things, Alonso was in favor of keeping the Monegasque Grand Prix on the Formula 1 calendar, amid discussions about whether it should disappear so that another test could enter that would favor the show more. “It has to be on the schedule, I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t be,” he said.
“Overtaking is difficult, but it is also difficult in Singapore, Barcelona or Budapest; before DRS and 2011 there was no overtaking in Barcelona, ??Budapest or Monaco, and there was no talk of removing those races from the calendar. Now there is talk in the media of random stuff, and this is one of those that doesn’t make sense.”