The closest Fernando Alonso came to denying Max Verstappen his dominating Monaco Grand Prix victory was when it began to rain in the second half of the race. The timing of their respective pit stops and the decisions that were made there brought momentary uncertainty to the outcome.
The rain landed first at the hairpin turn to Fairmont and the next two turns towards Portier, but it took a couple of laps to start spreading around the circuit.
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Just before the onset of the rain, Verstappen’s lead over Alonso was around 9 seconds, but as the track became slippery around those two corners, slowing the cars by over 7 seconds a lap , Alonso lost a lot of time with respect to the leader.
The temperatures of his hard compound tires were dropping more quickly than Verstappen’s mediums, although both were losing grip quickly, especially as the tread would already be badly worn, having been on the cars for over 50 laps.
Everyone was delaying pitting because it wasn’t clear if the rain was going to pass quickly, in which case stopping for intermediates would have been disastrous, or continuing, in which case stopping for new slicks would have been potentially ruinous.
With his tire temperatures dropping and losing 1-1.5sec a lap to Verstappen, Alonso pulled the trigger first, but when he did his first lap, just those three corners from the hairpin were seriously wet.
Discussing with his engineer what the tire choice should be when stopping, intermediates or medium slicks, Alonso emphasized that they should do something different to Verstappen. Doing the same thing was not going to win the race for them.
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They had a gap of more than one pit stop to third place Esteban Ocon, so even if they got the tire call wrong, they could pit again without losing position. With this reasoning, Alonso made the call to slicks, coming on at the end of lap 54 when Verstappen was left out.
As soon as he reached Massenet (Turn 3) on his out lap it was obvious that he had made the wrong decision as the rain had spread all over the circuit and was much heavier.
He returned for a corrective stop at Inters on the next lap, the same lap Verstappen was coming into for the same thing, having scraped the wall against Portier on his inside lap, such was the lack of grip on his old slicks. . The race result was essentially decided now, with Verstappen the dominant winner.
But, what if Alonso had chosen inters when he entered the first half? Would the extra lap that Verstappen missed with his slicks in the wet have allowed Alonso to take the lead? It’s impossible to know for sure, but the numbers suggest not.
Despite Verstappen losing around 5 seconds on his opening lap, his lead before Alonso’s first stop was too great for that to be a likely outcome. “It seems like even being five or six seconds off the beat [on the in-lap]we would still have been three or four on the road [if Alonso had rejoined on inters]said Red Bull boss Christian Horner.
‘Max was faster than us’: Alonso says he didn’t have the pace to fight for victory in Monaco
But Alonso did not regret it. The reasoning was sound. Monaco represented one of the best chances for Aston to beat Red Bull all season and they didn’t want to be conservative.
“That shows the commitment of the team and how aggressive everyone at Aston Martin was, trying to get the win,” said Fernando. “We knew it was inconvenient that the strategy that we could have finished maybe P5, P6 or something like that, outside the podium. But this morning, we discussed it and said we’ve had a couple of podium finishes this year, so it’s all or nothing, we start on the hard tyre.
“And we didn’t have the rhythm. That was the only problem we had in the race. I think the strategy was good. In our opinion, the medium tire was performing surprisingly well. We expected more grain or more degradation and Max was able to drive 50 laps at incredible pace, which was the reason he won the race. Not because of the strategy: he was simply faster than us ”.