Fernando Alonso says Ferrari have the faster car and the pace to win the Singapore Grand Prix if both drivers had started further up the grid.
After winning at Monza and taking pole position in Baku, Ferrari was tipped to continue its recent good run and emerge as McLaren’s main rival.
Carlos Sainz crashed in the final corner in Q3 while preparing for his timed lap, while Charles Leclerc missed his laps.
Leclerc put in an impressive race to gain five places and finish fifth, with Sainz recovering from a poor start with an early stop to finish seventh.
Alonso, who lost a place to Sainz in the pits and another to Leclerc on track, said his Aston Martin was no match for a Ferrari that had the potential to win the race.
“Ferrari should have won this race,” said Alonso, who finished eighth.
“It was probably the fastest F1 this weekend, so it wasn’t my race against Charles and Carlos.”
And Alonso highlights his own performance: “We are eighth, two seconds behind a Ferrari. So I don’t know if I can do better!”
The absence of Ferrari at the front allowed Lando Norris to remain unopposed with a resounding 20-second victory over Max Verstappen.
Ferrari boss Frédéric Vasseur made the same observation as Alonso and stressed that Leclerc’s ride in the second stint was equal to that of Norris.
“We matched Lando’s times in the last 25 laps. Maybe he was doing a bit of push-cool-push to recharge the battery and try to do the fastest lap, I didn’t follow him. But at least we were on the pace, and that’s encouraging.”
“But our goal was not to match Lando, but to come back, to score points and I think we have made up for the situation in qualifying.”
“If we missed something this weekend, it wasn’t Friday, it wasn’t Sunday, it was in between. It’s clear that until Q2 we were on Lando’s pace and we didn’t do a lap in Q3 with both cars.”
“It means starting from ninth and tenth and in Singapore it’s almost over. But it’s probably the best we could do in the race, maybe we could have had George [Russell].”
“But that was the maximum. It was clearly Q3 that cost us dearly.”
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