Fernando Alonso is hopeful Aston Martin will be closer to Max Verstappen over a race distance at the Canadian Grand Prix courtesy of its latest upgrades.
Aston brought a new floor and engine cover to Montreal, and Alonso will start alongside Verstappen on the front row after Nico Hulkenberg was penalized for a red flag infringement. Given the update to the car, Alonso feels challenging Verstappen for victory is a tall order but he is targeting a smaller deficit over a race distance.
“I think on the new parts, it’s early days, they’re still under evaluation,” Alonso said. “And I think we still need to optimize the setup of the car a little bit now with the new package, which is what we found yesterday. So I think in Austria or Silverstone, we will extract the maximum of it. Yesterday was too short an FP2.
“But happy; the new parts were good and delivering what we were expecting, so that’s another very good sign. And let’s see tomorrow in a dry race if we can challenge Max a little bit. I don’t think that we are at that level, that’s for sure, but in a state of being 20s behind or 30s behind, hopefully we are a little bit closer.
“I think tomorrow we have a chance to put some pressure. I think they had very easy wins until now and hopefully tomorrow they have to push a little bit more … Two seconds behind them; not 20s behind them.”