Azerbaijan GPFernando Alonso resigns himself to the slowness of the Aston Martin and warns: he will pass more times

The yo-yo of Aston Martin's performance in 2025, more often down than up on the year's average, is apparently at one of its lowest points in Baku, perhaps only ahead of those disastrous weekends in Miami and Belgium. The AMR25 suffers excessively on circuits where fast corners do not prevail and long straights are the norm, a true recipe for disaster in this Azerbaijan Grand Prix.

On other Fridays, it has been preached that the results, often with Aston Martins hovering around the top 5, were not a realistic representation of the car's performance, and surely they are not on this occasion either. But the numbers are not encouraging, with neither of the two cars getting past the 15th place achieved by Fernando Alonso in the fractured first session of the day. In the second, despite improving by more than a second, Alonso found himself in 19th place, while Lance Stroll remained steady in 17th position.

Situated in both sessions a second and a half off the best time, and in neither case with comparisons showing the true pace of McLaren, Alonso only beat Franco Colapinto in the second free practice, whose inefficient Alpine continues to demonstrate why it is the worst car of the season. The Team Silverstone machine is not much better, as Alonso attests in his brief words about the day.

“It’s no surprise, we struggle on this type of circuit. You need efficiency on this kind of layout, and it wasn’t our strong suit in Spa or Monza,” commented the Asturian driver, who predicted another scenario where a repetition of this situation could occur in a few months. “It will be the same in Las Vegas. There are very low-speed corners alongside very long straights, so you need to balance aerodynamic load and drag, and that’s where we need to improve.”

“Looking at the times, it seems we still have some pace to find this weekend. We’ll see what we can find tonight,” Alonso concluded, almost as a euphemism for the noticeable lack of speed and, above all, stability that his vehicle presented, palpable in each of his onboard shots. The Asturian already knows what it’s like to make Azerbaijani soup with few ingredients, as he demonstrated several years ago at McLaren, but he will need to draw on all his experience in the 'kitchen' to avoid indigestion.