Monaco Grand Prix: Lewis Hamilton heads Charles Leclerc as Ferrari dominate Friday practice

In first practice, Aston Martin’s Fernando Alonso saved what would have been a high-speed crash at the harbor chicane.

As he went over the hill at the start of the braking point the rear end swung sideways and when he corrected the car spun around, sending the front end into the barriers.

Although the incident broke the car’s front wing endplate, Alonso kept it largely under control and out of the barriers as the car slid wildly on the pavement outside the track.

Aston Martin had a difficult time in the second session; While Alonso was the 20th fastest, his teammate Lance Stroll was the slowest and was 0.880 seconds behind the master Spanish pilot.

Alonso said: “It’s a little bit of everything. We’re not happy with the front axle, we lose a lot of front grip in the middle of corners and we have a chronic understeer problem that we can’t solve.”

“In Monaco, upshifting, downshifting, harvesting the corners at a level level is very important in terms of being precise and safe in the corners, and at the moment the way the car downshifts and the speed at which it approaches the corners is very inconsistent. It is not easy to drive. We are not at the same level yet.”

The 44-year-old also delivered the latest in a series of eye-catching sentences describing his unhappiness with new cars introduced by this year’s rules, which nominally feature a 50-50 split between internal combustion and electric power.

“This is the worst generation of cars I’ve driven in Monaco,” he said. “The way you charge the engine during braking and starting creates a lot of inconsistency in engine braking – sometimes there is less thrust, sometimes there is thrust, sometimes there is not.

“If the battery is full, you can’t recharge it, so you can’t use engine braking. It’s like pushing it. It’s just the rules. Hybrid cars shouldn’t race. It’s that simple.”