F1 News: Fernando Alonso calls out Alpine's reliability issues - "It only happens to car #14"
Fernando Alonso's brilliant performance in Mexico was again undone by a reliability failure, as his Alpine machine ground to a halt in the final stages of the race.
Alonso was dominating the battle of the midfield in Mexico, comfortably running in seventh place and over 10 seconds ahead of teammate Esteban Ocon and Valtteri Bottas.
Unfortunately for the Spaniard, his efforts amounted to nothing after another mechanical failure.
Whilst Alpine continues to fight McLaren in the constructors, their biggest opponent this year has been their own reliability, which has proven especially costly for the team's only F1 World Champion.
Speaking to the media post-race, an understandably frustrated Alonso held nothing back on the abysmal reliability of his A522 this season:
"The car #14 always has reliability issues. With 20 laps left I lost a cylinder, so I only had five of them, meaning I had a 20% loss in power.
"I was twenty seconds ahead of the McLarens and my teammate. I think the race was going very well until that point.
"Austin and this race were some of my best in terms of pace...I've lost 60 points this year, and if we add another six, we have lost around 66 points.
"And obviously all the others benefit, so all our rivals gain more points than they should.
"It's impressive this year that only one [Alpine] car retires this year and it's always the #14 car.
"I've had five engines break this year; the issue in qualifying in Australia, in Austria we couldn't start the Sprint race...
"So I think in 19 races, in about half of them we haven't scored the points that we deserved, but there is nothing we can do now.
"In the first year with Honda, we had a penalty of 72-grid position at the end of the season, or something like that.
"But what happened with Honda is that both cars stopped. This year [at Alpine] it's only the car #14.
"The engine is not capable of finishing races. It cannot be bad luck if you have to change six or seven engines, as we have, and we still can't finish races.
"So I think they will need to work hard this winter."