The Saturday morning tricks that expose Alonso's true mindset

They were unnoticed by many, and eventually rendered futile due to a car problem that prevented him from starting the sprint race. But Fernando Alonso's tactics in second practice at the Austrian Grand Prix revealed that the Alpine driver is as sharp as he ever has been and wasting no opportunity to gain an advantage, which will play to his favour when his recent run of poor luck turns

The view from the Red Bull Ring media centre is one of the best of the Formula 1 season. It not only offers a great panorama of the pitlane, the track and the mountains beyond, but, if you get the right desk, it affords a brilliant view of the run out of the final corner too. It’s a great place to note the speed, lines and positioning of the cars through and from the exit of Turn 10, before they briefly disappear from view behind the roof edge of the one of the start/finish straight grandstands.

The benefit of that rhythm of cars ducking in and out of view in Saturday morning’s second free practice session last weekend actually acted as an alert to one car regularly doing something slightly different. They didn’t disappear from view as they were on a completely different line as they ran down past the pits so stayed in view throughout.

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Author Jonathan Noble

Jonathan Noble is Motorsport.com’s Formula 1 editor. Having graduated from University of Sussex Jonathan worked for sports news agency Collings Sports reporting on F1, F3, touring cars and other sports, with articles appearing in The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, Reuters, Autosport and other publications. In 1999 he moved to Haymarket Publishing to become a senior editor at Autosport Special Projects, and one year later he became Autosport’s grand prix editor. In 2015 he moved to Motorsport Network, becoming the F1 editor for Motorsport.com. He is also a member of the Guild of Motoring Writers, and sits on the FIA Media Council.

Jonathan has won multiple awards for journalism - in 1991 he was the winner of the Guild of Motoring Writers’ Sir William Lyons’ Award for young journalists, in 2010 he was awarded the Outstanding Individual accolade for consumer journalism in the Haymarket wards, in 2011 he won Haymarket’s Scoop of the Year, and in 2018 he was awarded a prestigious Medaglia d’Oro at the Lorenzo Bandini Awards for his contribution to F1 journalism.