How 'a miracle' helped Alonso and Aston Martin to earn P12 on the grid for the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia

It has been a painful run of races of late for Aston Martin. After taking a beating in Monza, Baku and Madrid, the team were hoping for something better at Sepang, with pure straight-line performance playing less of a role.

However, no one in the camp could have anticipated a Qualifying session that saw both Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll progress to Q2 on merit, and then earn P12 and P14 on the final grid having benefited from penalties for a couple of potentially quicker cars.

In fact, Alonso was in the mix from start of practice on a track that offered little grip, the three-time Sepang winner taking P14 in FP1 and P15 in FP2.

Of course, Friday doesn’t always give an accurate picture. However, rather than slip back on Saturday the Spaniard took an encouraging P12 in FP3.

He really started to look like a genuine contender for a spot in Q2, something he achieved this year only in Hungary, where he earned P16. He duly sailed through Q1 in P14, and was joined by team mate Stroll as the Canadian had his best Q1 performance of the season to take P15.

The bonus for the team was that two drivers with back-of-the-grid penalties, Arvid Lindblad and Franco Colapinto, opted out of doing flying laps in Q2. That opened up a couple of spots for the Aston Martins, and not content with that Alonso also outpaced the Williams of Carlos Sainz to claim P12, while Stroll took P14.

Encouragingly, on what is a long 95-second lap, Alonso was 1.524s seconds off the top Q2 time, set by the Red Bull of Max Verstappen. “It was good, obviously, no doubt our best weekend in terms of car performance,” he said. “Both cars in Q2 for the first time, and it was 1.5 seconds to the top of Q2. So yes, definitely a step forward in terms of competitiveness.

“The car is exactly the same as the last four rounds, since Budapest. It's just telling us that it depends on the circuit layout, and the amount of the straights we have – we can be more or less competitive, so nothing new in that regard. We just need to take opportunities when these weekends come, and hopefully tomorrow we have a clean race.”

Alonso downplayed the suggestion that he could fight for points on Sunday. “I would say no,” he said. “Looking at the whole season, why should we be in the points? I think so far it has been a good weekend, a good Saturday for us, but we need to have the feet on the ground. There are some fast cars starting behind us with some penalties as well, that will maybe come through.

“The first laps of the race we may lose a lot of positions in the straights with the main competitors, and then we can't overtake them, because we don't have the speed on the straight, and maybe damage the tyres. It's a miracle that we are fighting with cars that are much faster than us.”

The AMR26 had been kind on its tyres this year – a trait reflected in the fact that the team have often opted for soft in races – but Alonso doesn’t necessarily see that as a key factor.

“If you start in front of them, and you open a gap, you can manage the tyres, and you have a clean race,” he said. “But if you are behind them because you lose position from the first couple of straights, and then you cannot pass because you don't have the proper speed to overtake, then your race is heavily compromised."

“So it depends a lot of things tomorrow what we can achieve. So yeah, let's try to do a good one. Let's have fun with much better to be P12 that P21. So let's try to do it.”

This has been a difficult season for Stroll with his run of Q1 exits, but he too downplayed the Sepang performance and highlighted the track layout.

“It's our most competitive event of the season so far,” he said. “So fewer straights, more corners suits us. I couldn't really push much. I mean, the conditions were really tricky. It felt difficult.

"I didn't love my lap in Q2, but we're missing one second, more than a second on the straights. We think we know that we have these few events, Malaysia, Singapore, where maybe we can get the car out of Q1, and then something happens, a bit of opportunity. But as soon as we go back to the long straights, we're going to struggle again. So this track suits us – we knew coming into it.”