De la Rosa Impressed with how Alonso worked with tyres

Pedro de la Rosa, former Formula 1 driver, has been acting as official ambassador of Aston Martin since this year and is naturally happy for the team that is second in the constructors’ championship, and for Fernando Alonso, his compatriot and old friend, because in Miami, the two-time world champion climbed to the podium again.

“The weekend was not only successful – it went fantastically well! – the Spaniard shared his enthusiasm by taking part in the F1 Nation podcast. – You see, on Saturday our company was very uneven, in the first part of qualifying there were difficulties, and if it were not for this, Lance Stroll would also have had a chance to earn points, although he was close to the top ten ended up .

But in general I liked the race, we saw a lot of interesting duels on the track, including the battle for the leadership. Max Verstappen had a great lead, although he was on hard tyres, and Sergio Pérez defended with all his might, but the Medium tires on his Red Bull started to granulate.

But just before the finish, when Max drove faster and faster, it was already clear that his partner would not be able to compete, although the Mexican’s car already had a fresher set of Hard tires at that time. At that point it became clear that the game was over for him.

It seems the Medium rubber didn’t handle the loads well as Sergio simply couldn’t create the separation at the start of the race to keep the lead going forward.

I might add that at a certain stage of the race Fernando also started to have problems with the tires of this compound, and he felt that Carlos Says, who overtook him, could increase the pressure. The Ferrari driver was in the DRS zone all the time and Fernando couldn’t get the right pace out of the Medium tyres. In general, many riders complained that they had granularity in both the front and rear tires.

But Max dominated from the start of the weekend and made a single mistake – on the first attempt in the qualifying final. And then he was unlucky because of the red flags, but let’s look at it realistically: in Miami he performed exceptionally confidently and showed excellent speed, both in one fast lap and in long runs.

That’s why his win didn’t surprise me – Perez simply didn’t have enough speed over the race distance. In qualifying he drove a beautiful circle, but for this Sergio had to think carefully and analyze everything in detail to understand why Max is faster than him.

Verstappen showed excellent speed in the first sector of the circle from Turn 5 to Turn 8, where he was not always faster than his partner, but generally faster than everyone else. That’s the whole point, and Max was able to recover reasonably well after not the most successful weekend in Baku. But in Miami he was in his element from the first round.

Coming back to Fernando, I want to emphasize that he drove flawlessly and personally I was impressed with how effectively he worked with medium rubber in the first stint of the race when he was put under pressure by Carlos Sainz. When someone is on your heels, has actually dug into your gearbox and is opening the wing of the DRS system on every straight line, it’s very hard to save rubber.

The weekend was also interesting because on Saturday, during the third training session, we had difficulties, we tried to apply different settings, but gradually returned to the tried and tested option, and it worked.

Although these were the usual settings, it was not easy for the drivers to adapt to them on the new track, because before qualifying it was no longer possible to change the car’s clearance, adjust the mechanical balance, because the closed parking mode was already in effect.

I think the team got a lot of useful information this weekend, thought a lot out and in the end earned a lot of points. Although it could have been more, it was still an interesting weekend.”