Fernando Alonso said Formula 1 is “very easy from the sofa” as he responded to claims Aston Martin could have won in Monaco last weekend.
Alonso said that fitting intermediate tyres rather than slicks at a pit stop could “maybe” have given him the win.
But he added: “What I don’t like in F1 is that we see always the negatives.
“We never put enough value on the right things the teams do in very stressful moments. We always spot one team that do wrong and then go hard on them.”
The 41-year-old Spaniard finished second to Red Bull’s Max Verstappen at the Monaco Grand Prix for his and his team’s best result of the season so far.
Analysis of the race suggests that had Aston Martin fitted intermediate tyres when Alonso came in for his first pit stop as rain was falling on parts of the track he would have ended up ahead of Verstappen, who waited another lap to stop.
As it turned out, Alonso had to pit again a lap later because the rain worsened as he left the pits and it became obvious that wet-weather tyres were the right choice.
Alonso insisted his team made “the right decision” given conditions at the time.
Asked whether there was any way he could have come out ahead of Verstappen, he said: “Maybe – if you had the crystal ball and you know the conditions, you know who stops, who doesn’t stop, and then finally it rains and you need the inters, 100% you stop for inters.
“What I don’t like in F1 is that we see always the negatives and we all see everything very easy from the sofa.
“And I tell you an example. If we stop for inters, this week we will only talk about the wrong decision from Red Bull stopping one lap too late.
“We would never say: ‘Aston Martin was very brave and chose the right tyre.’ We would only say that Red Bull chose the wrong tyre and stopped one lap later.
“This is just the mentality of F1, the unlimited search for perfection which is not possible to reach sometimes.”
And he defended the decision he and Aston Martin made in real time in Monaco, insisting that when he came in to the pits, the track was only partially wet and the team did not know what the weather would do.
“Now, if we look the race on TV again, we will stop for inters, yes, 100% yes. That was better,” he said.
“But in that moment, why Max didn’t stop for inters as well? He kept one lap longer than me but with a different tyre.”
Alonso repeated the point he made on Sunday after the race in Monaco, that Aston Martin had enough of a gap behind to secure second place even if they risked choosing dry tyres but had to come in again for wet tyres a lap later if the decision proved wrong.
By contrast, he said, if they had fitted intermediate tyres at the first stop and then the rain had stopped, as they believed from their forecast it would, they would have fallen to seventh place behind a number of cars who had already changed for a new set of dry tyres 10 or more laps earlier before the rain arrived.
“So,” he said, “if we take the wrong decision, we finish P2 in Monaco. We took that.”
