Alonso learned valuable ‘lessons’ from mixed conditions in Imola F1 race

Fernando Alonso says he learned some valuable “lessons” during Formula 1’s action-packed Emilia Romagna Grand Prix.

Cool temperatures and rain shortly before the start of the second round of the season at Imola caused havoc and led to an incident-filled race, in which Alonso recovered from a poor start and survived a spin to come home in 11th.

Following a post-race time penalty for Alfa Romeo’s Kimi Raikkonen, Alonso was promoted to 10th, marking the two-time world champion’s first points finish since returning to F1 this year.

Speaking before his points finish was confirmed, the Spaniard was happy to take some important learnings from the mixed conditions as he looks to get fully up to speed in his comeback season.

“It feels kind of obvious that every lap I do, every lap we do, we feel more comfortable,” Alonso explained.

“Here [at Imola] it was a triple experience, because from lap one to the end we changed conditions and we changed grip level so many times during the race. We had one red flag, we had one standing start, we had one rolling start.

“There were a lot of things to practice and a lot of things to go through that normally take four or five races. And we compressed all in one race with a lot of activity.

“So I’m happy with the learnings. I’m also happy with feeling the car in wet conditions, as obviously our testing was one-and-a-half days in Bahrain but it was the very first time in wet conditions, the very first time in inter conditions, the very first time in conditions with only one narrow dry line.

“So a lot of lessons to take from here to analyse.”

Despite ultimately coming away from the weekend with both cars inside the points following the penalties, Alonso was left feeling that Alpine could have capitalised on the conditions more.

“Normally you do like these races when you start at the back as you have more possibility to come back, to gamble on strategy, to fit a tyre that is more a risk,” he said.

“So for sure when you start at the back you like these races, but we struggle to take the opportunity. Even with all the action we didn’t maybe capitalise, so there’s still something to improve on our side.

“But it was a fun race for sure. It was like a test day because finally we were able to test in many conditions today and that’s very useful information.”