"Unlucky" crash caused by gravel on racing line

Fernando Alonso said he was “unlucky” to crash out of the Australian Grand Prix after hitting gravel which had been dragged onto the racing line.

The Aston Martin driver spun into a barrier at the exit of turn six on lap 33. The track was drying out at the time and most of his rivals pitted for slick tyres shortly afterwards.

“The incident came from nowhere, to be honest,” said Alonso after the race. “I was a little bit surprised about losing the car.”

“I was not wider than any other lap,” he told the official F1 channel. “I just found a lot of gravel stuck there in the middle of the circuit, and then I spun.

“So it was a very costly incident, but I don’t know really what to do differently. Let’s try to analyse it a little bit better. I think it’s a little bit of an unlucky incident.”

He was running in the points when he crashed. “I was 10th, Antonelli was 11th, I don’t know if I could keep the point in our pocket,” said Alonso. “But hopefully we’ll get better. We have another chance in five days, that’s the good thing.”

“I think the pace was similar to the midfield,” he added. “I was fighting with Gasly, Antonelli was clearly faster but [it was] not that easy to overtake us.

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“So all in all, I think we are in the mix. Some weekends will be better, some weekends will be a little bit more difficult, but we will try to improve.”

Alonso’s team mate Lance Stroll brought some cheer to Aston Martin by bringing his car home in sixth place. However he admitted he never felt comfortable in the challenging conditions.

“Confidence was a big word out there today,” said Stroll. “I never had a lot of confidence.

“The conditions were so tricky [on] the dry tyres, just one dry line, and then everything else was wet, and then vice-versa on the inters. It was super-tricky, so I think it was just about keeping it clean, and we did that.”