"Fernando Alonso is slightly clutching at straws" - F1 journalist dismisses Aston Martin driver's speculation over the car's loss of performance

F1 pundit Edd Straw feels that Aston Martin driver Fernando Alonso was 'slightly clutching at straws' as he blamed the new compounds introduced by Pirelli at Silverstone as one of the reasons for their lack of performance.

Since the 2023 Austrian GP, Aston Martin have struggled to match the pace of their competitors around and found themselves fighting for the final points as was evident in Hungary. During the race weekend, Fernando Alonso pointed out that the new Pirelli compounds have dented their and Red Bull's performance more compared to their rivals.

While appearing on The Race podcast, Edd Straw rubbished Alonso's claims, saying:

"The only thing I will say that might have anything for Alonso is obviously driver is a remarkable sensor in the car because they are the point where it all comes together. So he might be feeling something but there's nothing in any of those performance swings that are not able to be explained by upgrades and by execution.

"So I think Alonso is slightly clutching at straws there and he is just trying to say that correlation equals causation in that unless somebody on the team comes with some reason why that's the case."

Fernando Alonso analyzes his performance at 2023 Hungarian GP

Fernando Alonso, meanwhile, stated that the three points that the team got during the Hungarian GP weekend were the maximum they could have gotten, given the limitations in terms of performance they experienced in Budapest.

As per F1.com, Fernando Alonso said:

“I think three points for us was the maximum we could achieve [as a team] today. We had a bit of a lonely race with no threats behind us, but we were unable to make significant ground-up on our competitors ahead of us. It was a hot and demanding race as well and we all had to manage the tyres throughout.

"There have been a lot of surprises in the last few race weekends, but we need to try our best to get back to fighting at the front of the pack. We will analyze everything and look to bounce back at Spa next week.”

The two-time world champion and his team will hope that they can find a particular issue that is bothering them in the past couple of races and fix it before heading into Spa and the summer break after this weekend. Aston Martin will be keen to rediscover their early-season form in the second half of the season and finish on a strong note.