Fernando Alonso saw a chance to fight Lewis Hamilton for the final step of the podium during the sprint in Miami, something he believes could have been possible if Aston Martin had listened to his input.
A wet track forced all drivers to start the sprint on wet weather tyres. The track, however, started drying up, albeit not as quickly as expected.
Nevertheless, Lewis Hamilton, for instance, jumped into the slick tyres' window at the right time and he jumped straight to P3 as drivers ahead of him waited too long to make the switch. Alonso wanted to stop for dry tyres at the same time as his British counterpart, yet Aston Martin disagreed.
'We should've been fighting Hamilton for P3'
"We thought it was not the right moment and at the end we found ourselves fighting with Liam (Lawson, ed.)," said Alonso to media like GPblog, after the Sprint race.
Ironic, since it was the Racing Bulls driver who put him in the wall on the outside of 12, effectively bringing his race to a premature end.
"We should never be in that position and we should be fighting with Hamilton maybe for P3 or P4."
In the end there was little more than a stricken AMR25 and an 'unimportant' trip to the Stewards' room for Alonso after the Saturday morning race in Miami.
"I don't give any importance to that because I should be wheel to wheel with Hamilton for P3 if I stop in the time that the track was ready," stressed the Spaniard.
Fernando Alonso had a complicated sprint race in Miami that finished in a DNF, but that could've been a podium.
'Aston Martin listened to their tools instead of their driver'
What was the reason for Aston Martin to override his input? One that Alonso believes the team could have a bit more of an open mind on.
"It's difficult to read everything and not many cars had a stop in that moment. So, it's a very car dependent [situation]. Sometimes one car can keep up the dry tyres alive easily when it's damp and vice versa. Some other cars, the inters, they can hold for longer."
"In our case it was clear that the inters were not good enough and obviously in the computer it's difficult to see that."
But, shouldn't the team listen to its driver then? "Yeah, sure, but I don't know, that's a question for them," Alonso concluded.
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