Why Alonso and Aston made the call that guaranteed Verstappen's Monaco victory

“For me it was very clear that the track, on that lap we stopped, was completely dry, apart from Turn 7 and 8,” Fernando Alonso reflected, discussing his call to pit for medium tyres at the end of lap 54 of an unusual Monaco Grand Prix.

Having discussed the weather forecast with his Aston Martin engineers, they concluded that incoming rainfall would amount to nothing more than “a small shower”. Expecting it to pass, the team stuck to its guns with its hard-medium tyre strategy, and Alonso was expecting a few laps of clinging on at the Fairmont Hairpin and Portier before the rain subsided.

Then the heavens creaked open a little more. More of the circuit was awash, and Alonso was forced into quickly conceding defeat to collect the intermediate tyre on the next lap, following race leader Max Verstappen into the pits and emerging over 20 seconds behind.

The race had been a tepid affair until that point, and the battle for victory was all but over as Verstappen coaxed his medium compound tyres far beyond any expected drop-off in performance. Alonso, furnished with hard tyres as he and Aston Martin opted to take the opposite strategy to the Red Bull ace, had put his chips on the mediums falling off sooner over the course of the 78-lap race.

Instead, the hards proved slightly susceptible to graining, particularly on the rear-left corner. The medium compound was not immune to this, and Verstappen had to go through his own graining phase, but proved more consistent in keeping tyre temperature within the correct window. Starting on the hards also made it much more difficult for Alonso to draw alongside Verstappen into the first corner, with Aston Martin’s strategists hoping to play the long game and benefit from the softer tyre once fuel loads had burned off.

Regardless, it was a proactive strategy that Alonso lauded among the post-race media obligations. It placed Red Bull on the defensive and forced Verstappen into going long on the medium compound to mitigate the damage that could be done with the hard-medium offset on lower fuel loads.

Alonso had admitted on the previous day that mounting an overtake into Turn 1 would be unlikely anyway, particularly as the Red Bull RB19’s leisurely approach to starts earlier in the year had been dialled out. He settled in behind the Dutchman, making sure to cover off any possibility of a fast-starting Esteban Ocon from mounting a charge down the inside.

After keeping clear of Alonso at the first corner, Verstappen stretched out a lead nursing his medium tyres

Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / Motorsport Images

Although DRS is largely ineffective in Monaco, owing to the short nature of the start/finish stretch, Verstappen made certain to build up more than a second’s gap in the first trio of laps to counter any possible threat from Alonso, and continued to extract more pace from his softer tyres to continue his breakaway in earnest. It became apparent that the harder tyres were suffering more, even by the 10th lap, and Alonso was given the green light to use up more of the rubber at the front to protect the rears.

Tyres then worried Alonso, who broadcasted his fears that he may have a front-right puncture, but was given the all-clear from his race engineer. Verstappen’s lead continued to blossom into something bordering on the unassailable. By the end of the 20th lap, the championship leader was 8.5s up the road; five laps later, it had swelled to an 11.8s advantage.

Verstappen was having his own tyre concerns, however, and reported that the front-left wasn’t looking “pretty” as he continued to press on in his opening stint. Traffic was beginning to loom large in his eyeline, appearing to resemble the loosely managed congestion outside of the circuit that required a robust approach to navigate.

Luckily, his team-mate Sergio Perez was among them to grease the wheels, as the Mexican was enduring a torrid day in Monaco a year after his win. He let Verstappen go free, but the traffic allowed Alonso to close up as he had yet to reach the procession.

"It was completely dry around 99% of the track. So I stopped for dries, as the weather forecast was a small shower. We had a lot of margin behind us to put on the dry tyres and, if necessary, the inters. Maybe it was extra safe" Fernando Alonso

By the time Alonso caught the tailback the lead had slipped to just 5.6s, but it was now the Spaniard’s turn to clear the backmarkers as Verstappen had eventually broken through. He managed to get through with a modicum of greater fortune, getting to within about nine seconds of Verstappen once he had progressed beyond the hurdles.

Rain, however, entered the thoughts of the race engineers, and after half-distance dark clouds began to suffuse the formerly azure skies. It became a question of when, not if, the rain would begin to fall, and this forced those yet to stop into hanging on and waiting it out until inclement weather had sufficiently affected the field of play. The Verstappen-Alonso dyad remained relatively static at the front, save for a few fluctuations either side of the nine-second mark, until the 50th lap when the first peppering of precipitation began.

Verstappen’s engineer Gianpiero Lambiase told his driver to expect “drops of rain in Turns 6 to 8”, while George Russell encountered “spitting in Turn 3”. It remained uncertain at this juncture whether conditions would deteriorate and necessitate a swap to intermediates, but the intensity of the downpour swiftly tempted some of the backmarkers to make an exploratory switch to the green-walled Pirellis.

Alonso's decision to stick with his original strategy and take mediums backfired as he came in again for inters one lap later

Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / Motorsport Images

This prompted the discussions on the pitwall between Alonso and his team, and enough of the circuit was dry in the Oviedo-born driver’s opinion to persist with the planned strategy on lap 54. Speaking after the race, he felt that it was still the right call with the information available.

“It was completely dry around 99% of the track,” he recalled. “So I stopped for dries, as the weather forecast was a small shower. We had a lot of margin behind us to put on the dry tyres and, if necessary, the inters. Maybe it was extra safe, I don't know.

“But in that minute and a half that it took to go through Turns 5, 6, 7, and 8, it changed completely. It was very wet when I got to those corners…”

Hardly dressed for the conditions having been caught out by the rain, Alonso had to stop again. Verstappen held on through the deluge to make his own swap to intermediates on the following tour, and Alonso followed him in to ditch his lap-old mediums. The odds were now considerably stacked in Verstappen’s favour, barring any misfortune across the 23 remaining laps.

It could be viewed that Aston Martin’s initial pit call killed off any hopes of allowing Alonso to break the Red Bull monopoly over race victories, but this is not only a gross oversimplification of events, it detracts from Verstappen’s own stunning efforts in extending his medium-tyre stint. Ultimately, there were very few options that could offer Alonso a lifeline.

Had Aston held out for one more lap, Alonso would have stopped at the same time as Verstappen and at most preserved the status quo. The engineers dressed in British Racing Green, however, had detected that Alonso’s tyre temperatures were dropping to a point where the hard tyres were becoming ever more perilous to hustle around the rapidly dampening circuit. Hanging on for another tour of the track would have expanded the deficit to Verstappen, which had already grown to 13.3s as the initial drizzle began to harm the precariously balanced hard-tyre temperatures.

The projections on the Aston Martin pitwall were that, in taking the intermediate tyres a lap earlier, Alonso would have potentially lost a hatful of positions had the rain persisted at its earlier rate. It’s true that the intermediate tyres are malleable on a drying track, as the grooves wear down to form pseudo-slicks, but this is only viable when most the cars are on a similar compound. On a barely wet track, they simply burn up and leave a driver vulnerable to those persisting with slick tyres. It was a leap of faith that the team felt it didn’t need to take.

Track conditions and temperatures swayed Aston Martin against an early wet tyre gamble

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

Aston Martin team principal Mike Krack expanded on those estimates, where the indication was that the hot temperatures on the French Riviera would help the circuit to clean up quickly once the rain had subsided.

“Honestly, we thought we could go to the end with the mediums because it will dry quickly,” the Luxembourger added. “But then we misjudged a bit that it was raining because in this part of the track where we are standing it took very long before it started to rain. And also this area, it rained the least. So probably that was a bit a misjudgement, because we thought also that the inters would wear down massively in this part of the track.

“At the end of the day, it was a conscious decision to go on the mediums. And we saw then a lap later that it was not going to work.”

Once Verstappen and Alonso had completed their stops and run through their out-laps, the difference between the two sat at around 23s. But this swiftly began to dwindle, dropping by nearly 5s over the next five laps, fuelling hopes among the F1 neutrals that Alonso could cross the Rubicon and stage an unlikely comeback.

"I had Lando in my gearbox as well so at one point, I was like, ‘Well, I do need to speed up a bit’. But yeah, it's not a comfortable situation to be in, and it's like that to run here in the wet" Max Verstappen

Not so; this was simply a case of Verstappen trying not to take too many risks amid the conditions. After all, he could afford to lend Alonso a few seconds while he ensured that his intermediate tyres were warm enough for the job.

He admitted that, with the recently lapped Lando Norris behind him knocking on the door, he was inspired to pick up the pace a little bit more. Balancing risk versus reward was vital and, despite a few hairy moments, Verstappen felt secure enough to pick up the pace.

“It was just that I had a big lead and I didn't want to risk trying to be the same pace or faster and then end up in the wall,” he said. “You have to be a little bit more careful. It's just about not taking too much risk but at the same time, of course not driving too slowly.

“I think I had Lando in my gearbox as well so at one point, I was like, ‘Well, I do need to speed up a bit’. But yeah, it's not a comfortable situation to be in, and it's like that to run here in the wet. I had to change a few things on the steering wheel as well to just give me a bit of a better balance, and that definitely helped as well.”

Leaning on his healthy lead, Verstappen kept his cool and control to ease to victory

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

There was a moment where, without a quick jolt of opposite lock, Verstappen could have lodged his car in the barrier at Portier as the slippery track surface briefly loosened the reins. He explained later that light contact at a couple of points with the wall reminded him to tighten up his driving, rather than easing off, to ensure that he could keep temperature in his tyres when the conditions were at their wettest.

After those initial laps where the gap came down, Verstappen’s renewed push ensured that he could rebuild and stabilise the gap at around 20s. Over the remaining 15 laps, as the rain eventually stopped and a drying line began to form, he kept up the pace and turned the wick up to an extent that Alonso simply could not cope with. Thus, the gap grew to around 28s as Alonso was perhaps more concerned with bringing the car home rather than trying to overcome the rapidly decreasing odds.

Amid the changing conditions, Verstappen’s drive was exquisite barring the handful of wall-tickling excursions that could have derailed his victory charge with an iota of added momentum. And sure, the result was one that has become all too familiar in 2023, but the injection of rain was a nonetheless welcome addition to a race that threatened to fizzle out with little fanfare if it had remained dry. His 39th win in a Red Bull, Verstappen ominously surpassed four-time champion Sebastian Vettel’s tally from his stint with the Milton Keynes squad.

The chaos could also not prevent Esteban Ocon’s phenomenal efforts in converting third on the grid into his third F1 podium, under overwhelming pressure from a pre-rain battle with Carlos Sainz and enduring a post-rain, two-pronged attack from Mercedes.

Sainz’s multiple bids to leapfrog the Frenchman throughout the first half of the race bordered from the clumsy to the bizarre, particularly as Ferrari attempted to goad Ocon into making a premature pitstop with at least two dummy pitcalls. Ocon fell for neither “box to overtake Ocon” messages from Sainz’s engineer Riccardo Adami, and nor did he yield on-track despite the Spanish driver’s efforts to try and prise an opening.

On the brink of the race’s metamorphosis from dry into wet, Sainz picked out his best chance and tried to stalk the Alpine heading out of the tunnel. He attempted to make a move at the Nouvelle Chicane, but Ocon easily held the corner and Sainz was forced to take to the escape road.

Their fight ended when the Ferrari squad decided to delay their pitstops to lap 55. Charles Leclerc nipped past Sainz on their way to the pits as the Spaniard briefly slid down the Mirabeau escape road, and got first service at their double-stack stop to pull the Madrid-born driver out of the ring for third.

Despite his best efforts to get by Ocon, Sainz ended up going backwards when the rain fell

Photo by: Alpine

The Mercedes duo, through their properly executed double stack on lap 54, undercut the Ferraris as a result. Ocon was in touching distance and both Lewis Hamilton and George Russell soon wound the Normandy native in as they hoped to celebrate the success of the W14’s new upgrades with a podium. But Russell was hamstrung by a five-second penalty for rejoining the circuit unsafely – the reverse from his slip at Mirabeau in the wet had taken him into the path of the hapless Perez.

Angling for a podium, Russell politely asked Mercedes if the team could switch he and Hamilton around to cover off the 5s loss. But with Leclerc some way off the pair, Mercedes was happy to retain the order and allow Hamilton the chance to attack Ocon. But every time Hamilton drew closer, Ocon threw enough of a defensive shape to make Hamilton take to the wetter off-line section.

Those hoping for the last vestiges of a title battle in 2023 to emerge had pinned their hopes on two elements: inclement weather and a charge from Alonso. But neither element yielded the requisite threat to Verstappen over the Monaco GP

The pressure eventually relented, and Ocon chalked up his third F1 podium in the round closest to a home race now that the French GP sits on hiatus. Following reports of discord in the Alpine ranks, Ocon’s podium could not have come at a better time, but any bellwether of progress after a less-than-stellar start to 2023 will have to wait until Barcelona.

“Clearly the car felt more alive and I had a lot more confidence in it to start the weekend,” he said. “We did bring some updates that were supposed to be quite small but everything we had went in the right direction today. I definitely felt good and I hope that this is the start of something, but I think we need to keep our feet to the ground, see where we are next weekend. Barcelona will be a good test.”

Those hoping for the last vestiges of a title battle in 2023 to emerge had pinned their hopes on two elements: inclement weather and a charge from Alonso. But neither element yielded the requisite threat to Verstappen over the Monaco GP, even if both looked threatening over various points of the race. And if those conditions can’t stop Verstappen from continuing his roll-over of the field this season, is there anything else that can?

Verstappen withstood everything Alonso and Monaco threw at him, leaving many to wonder if he can be beaten at all in 2023

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images