Adrian Newey: The potential of the car has not yet been fully realized.

      Aston Martin drivers start the Dutch Grand Prix from distant positions – Fernando Alonso showed the 18th result in qualifying, Lance Stroll – 19th, however, in their comments and the words of Adrian Newey, there are already notes of optimism.

      Fernando Alonso (18th): “We were close to making it into the second part of qualifying, having extracted almost everything the car was capable of. We need to continue working on improving the handling, striving to gradually reduce the gap.

      In any case, we should be satisfied that in the first part of qualifying we were only 1.3 seconds behind the leader, whereas just a few races ago we were on average 4 seconds behind the top teams. Let's see what we can achieve tomorrow, and we will also try to enjoy our last race in Zandvoort.”

      Lance Stroll (19th): “Today we faced the same issues as yesterday. We need to improve the handling characteristics of the AMR26 and the balance of the car – all attention should be focused on that right now.

      It seems our race pace is somewhat better than our qualifying pace. We should have the opportunity to attack more aggressively throughout the entire lap in qualifying. But we are still making progress, working hard, and will continue to push to take the next step forward.”

      Adrian Newey, team principal: “When a sprint is part of the weekend program, practice time is limited; nevertheless, this weekend we were able to work effectively and gather important data that allows us to better understand the characteristics of the recently introduced updates and the upgraded power unit.

      Both drivers, assessing the chassis behavior and the effectiveness of the aerodynamic package, confirm that a significant step forward has been made. The main conclusion is that we need to improve the handling, which will then allow us to increase the speed of the AMR26.

      The pace has improved significantly compared to where we were a couple of races ago, but we know that the potential of the car has not yet been fully unlocked.”