Mike Krak: Alonso helps his vast experience

At Zandvoort, Fernando Alonso achieved his 105th F1 podium finish by finishing second at the Dutch Grand Prix. He did this for the first time more than twenty years ago, when he took third place in Malaysia in March 2003, speaking for the Renault factory team.

But since this year the two-time world champion has become an Aston Martin F1 driver, and team boss Mike Krak has not been stingy with his praise.

“The race was very exciting, but this weekend there was a lot of difficulty overall due to the constantly changing weather conditions,” Krak told Sky Sports. – Of course second place is a great result for Fernando and for the whole team. On top of that, he also drove the fastest lap of the race, earning us 19 points, offsetting to some extent the recent downturn in competitiveness.

We see the first signs that we have managed to add something again, but now we have to try to stay at this level. Before the race in Monza and then in Singapore we will try to confirm our speed on these circuits, but for now we will enjoy the success we achieved in Zandvoort.

Now we understand that we made the right decisions during the race when, before many, Fernando first switched to intermediate rubber and then returned to slicks. Lance Stroll stayed on track longer, but it turned out to be a mistake. But when things move so fast, the team has very little time to make decisions.

In the case of Fernando, the decision was right, in the case of Lance it was bad, and now we have to analyze everything to understand what exactly led to it. The appearance of the safety car allowed him to regain several positions, but he had already lost too many.

But Alonso is helped by his vast experience gained in Formula 1 and in endurance racing – now all of this is paying off. So Fernando has both experience and skill, because it is very difficult to drive on a flooded track.

They work together with the team. Fernando constantly questions the engineer, has all the information and acts very correctly at the right time. When we talk about the efficiency of our car, we could add something to Spa, we took the next step in Zandvoort, but here we have to be careful and not jump to conclusions.

Are we heading in the right direction? We have to do more races, especially as the weather conditions in the Netherlands changed every day, so it is quite risky to draw conclusions about the balance of power after this weekend.”