Alonso admits Aston Martin have ‘an uphill battle’ to score points as Stroll says there’s ‘a lot of work ahead’

Aston Martin had a weekend to forget in Texas, as they failed to score with either car in either the Sprint or the Grand Prix. While they remain secure in fifth in the championship, it was still a chastening weekend that saw plenty of their midfield rivals out-strip them on pure pace.

Fernando Alonso started seventh after a strong qualifying, but soon found himself going backwards. He was overtaken by cars on the same strategy and in the end came home in P13.

“It was a tough race for us today and we dropped back a few places from our starting position,” the Spaniard said afterwards. “I think we outperformed the car’s natural position in qualifying and we knew it would be an uphill battle to stay inside the top 10.”

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Coupled with his disappointing Sprint, where Alonso also went backwards from his startng position, it was easy to see why there weren’t too many positives to draw from Austin. But at least he has an immediate chance to try again in Mexico next weekend – although that does mean there isn't too much time to analyse the data and work out what went wrong.

“[We’ll] try to understand what we can do better for Mexico. Optimising the package will be needed at this point because we didn’t perform well enough. Work to do in the next three days,” he concluded.

As for Lance Stroll, any hopes he had of progressing were undone at the Safety Car restart. The Canadian had started on the hard compound tyres, the highest runner to do so and that strategy worked well for several others. In fact all the other hard-shod starters made it back into the points, bar Stroll and Lewis Hamilton, who failed to finish.

But being unable to keep temperature in his tyres behind the Safety Car proved costly for Stroll, who ran off the track and dropped to last when racing did resume. He eventually came home in 15th place.

“Just lacking pace compared to the others,” was his assessment. “I had a messy restart, fell to the back with a big snap in Turn 10 and then I went on the grass and lost a bunch of positions. But even after that, [I was] struggling for pace and couldn’t come back through the field. We have a lot of work ahead of us for sure.”

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