Aston Martin on social media is “borderline abuse” after the team’s
poor start to the F1 season. Seven rounds into the campaign, the
Silverstone-based squad has scored just one point, which was
inherited after Sergio Perez’s post-race penalty at the Monaco
Grand Prix. The team’s abject underperformance in its first year in
partnership with Honda has been one of the dominant narratives of
the season. Whilst Alonso, who has not ruled out retiring from F1
in the not-too-distant future, and Aston Martin have reiterated
that results will eventually turn around, the Spanish driver has
been linked to a return to Alpine in recent weeks. “There are
always rumours,” the two-time F1 drivers’ champion told media,
including RacingNews365 , to partially set the record straight when
asked about the speculation. “We’ve been very badly treated by the
outside world, and it’s normal; we are underperforming. We are in a
bad moment, and when summer break comes, there are always rumours.
“There are rumours in the top teams. There are rumours also, in our
case, because we are underperforming, but my commitment with Aston
Martin is beyond my driving time, and I believe in this project,
and we have the right people, we have, obviously, the best of the
best with Adrian Newey, we have Honda, we started on the back foot,
yes, we understand that, but we are trying to put things in place
as soon as possible, but we are an easy target, because we are at
the back.” Countering the ‘borderline abuse’ Alonso made it clear
that some of the reaction to Aston Martin’s difficult campaign has
gone too far, whilst reaffirming his faith in the fledgling
works-team operation. “There is all this social media, and all
these things, and jokes that you can put on ourselves, probably
that’s borderline abuse on social media, that we talk sometimes
that we are not happy with our position,” he added. “But we are
hard workers, and Honda are hard workers, and Aston Martin, we are
a thousand people of hard workers, who go Monday to Sunday, to work
eight hours, to fix our problems; and the problems will be fixed.
It’s a matter of time.” Despite the team’s decision to delay
performance-centric upgrades being widely questioned by the media,
the 44-year-old underlined that all involved were in agreement over
the approach. “I believe in the project. I trust my team, and we
are all in this together,” the 32-time grand prix winner said. “And
obviously, we take one of the hardest parts of the situation,
because we race every week, and we face the media every week, and
we jump in the car tomorrow, and we are very uncompetitive, but our
team and our leaders, they decided in Australia to wait until it
was worth making an upgrade package, for cost efficiency and things
like that, and we all agree on that. “And we are all waiting on
that, and we wait in the best manner possible.”