Alonso<\/a>, when asked if he felt optimistic of another strong result this weekend in the Dutch Grand Prix. “For sure a little bit more optimistic than some of the other Fridays we did.<\/p>\n“Hungary was strong for us, we go into the following race at Zandvoort and we’re still showing some good pace in free practice. We know it’s only free practice but it’s good to see our times up there and let’s see what we can do tomorrow.”<\/p>\n
Despite the impressive Friday showing, Alonso was wary of suggestions he could challenge Norris and championship leader Oscar Piastri for pole, as the McLaren duo have generally dominated the season.<\/p>\n
“No, not really,” he said. “I don’t think it’s within our reach to fight with the McLarens but maybe some of the top teams, Mercedes, Ferrari, Red Bull, they seem not too far away so we will try to be in that mix.”<\/p>\n
Team mate Stroll had a mixed Friday at Zandvoort, registering the third quickest time in FP1 before suffering a heavy crash in FP2 at the banked Turn 3.<\/p>\n
Although reporting he was okay over the radio, his AMR25 suffered substantial damage on the right side.<\/p>\n
“Just a little lock-up and from there I was just a passenger. Just one of those things,” said Stroll of the crash.<\/p>\n
“For sure, we looked competitive throughout the day and again Fernando in FP2. I think we’re in a good spot and see what we can do tomorrow.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fernando Alonso has claimed that it is not “within our reach to fight with the McLarens” for pole…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":104769,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[64,63,806,805,803,804,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-104768","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-motosport","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-motor","11":"tag-motor-sports","12":"tag-motosport","13":"tag-motosports","14":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104768"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104768\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/104769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}