Exiled spaniards lured home by robust economic recovery

Fernando Alonso has reiterated he’ll need Red Bull’s help to win this year’s Drivers’ Championship title because, based on pure pace, Aston Martin “don’t have a chance”.

With Aston Martin the most improved outfit on the grid this season, Alonso has taken his chances with his new team and raced his way to five podiums in six races. The latest came at the Monaco Grand Prix where the Spaniard bettered his previous P3s with a runner-up result.

That allowed him to close the gap on Sergio Perez in the Drivers’ standings to just 12 points, but championship leader Max Verstappen taking yet another win, his fourth of the season, Alonso is now 51 points off the pace.

It seems unlikely, given Red Bull’s pace, that the Spaniard has a shot at this year’s World title as he’s yet to even finish a race, barring Australia, within 20s of the Red Bull winner.

Alonso insists he’s not giving up, after all he’s come close in the past, most notably 2010 and 2012, when as with this season he wasn’t in the best car on the grid.

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“Let’s see,” he replied when asked if he a chance.

“I think in any other of the seasons that I remember, back in the 2000s or early 2010s, I will be leading the championship with the results that I got this year but now there is Red Bull and Max dominating every race and even with great results, you’re just stepping behind them, every race. So I don’t know.

“We didn’t have the best car in 2010 and we arrived leading the championship in Abu Dhabi. We didn’t have the best car in ’12 and we still fight for the championship until the last lap in Brazil. So the championship is long, we will not give up.

“We will need weekends where Red Bull has some issues like Sergio had here with the DNF or zero points. And if Max has one or two of those, we will be a little bit closer in the championship.

“This is motorsport. Anything can happen. But on pure pace I think we don’t have a chance yet. But we will not give up for sure.”

Alonso has yet to win a grand prix this season with his P2 in Monte Carlo his best result. But while he is hoping for a victory before the year is out, he’s “happy” to be in the position he’s in today.

“I will love to receive the trophy from there,” he admitted. “But yeah, I’m not getting obsessed with this to be honest.

“I will be happy fighting for the championship with all second places until the end of the year or fighting for the championship next year.

“This year is just a gift, what we are having every weekend is just a celebration on the team. We didn’t expect this and this is just a build up into next year so hopefully good things are coming.”

Markets mostly rose Monday on news that President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy have reached a deal to lift the US debt ceiling and avoid a calamitous default.

After weeks of wrangling, the two announced that an agreement had finally been reached and urged lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to vote for it before the government runs out of cash on June 5.

However, there is some nervousness on trading floors as the bill contains plenty of elements that are likely to anger Democrats and Republicans alike.

For now, dealers are upbeat as the breakthrough lifts the threat of a debt default by the United States that economists warn could hammer the global economy and cause market turmoil.

The bill will suspend the debt ceiling until January 1, 2025, and place curbs on federal spending that will please some Republicans, but it does not deliver the big cuts right-wingers wanted and progressive Democrats would have balked at.

“The agreement prevents the worst possible crisis,” Biden said at the White House on Sunday. “Which means no one got everything they want.”

“But that’s the responsibility of governing. I strongly urge both chambers to pass that agreement.”

He added: “It takes the threat of a catastrophic default off the table, protects our hard-earned and historic economic recovery and… represents a compromise that means no one got everything they want.”

McCarthy said: “We know anytime we sit and negotiate with two parties, that you got to work with both sides of the aisle. So it’s not 100 percent of what everybody wants.”

Hopes that a deal was in the works lifted all three main indexes on Wall Street on Friday, and Asia picked up the baton Monday.

Tokyo rallied one percent while Sydney, Shanghai, Bangkok, Mumbai, Taipei, Manila and Wellington were also in the green. But Hong Kong, Singapore and Jakarta were unable to maintain their early gains and turned lower.

Paris and Frankfurt rose in the morning. London was closed for a holiday.

– Fresh pressure on the Fed –

Max Verstappen has revealed even his engineer Gianpiero Lambiase wanted to know why he wasn’t slowing down as he came close to his losing control of his RB19 a few times in the rain in Monaco.

In fact he did clip the barrier at least one, a hard hit at Turn 16 but fortunately for the driver it was one that didn’t damage his car.

Despite running on worn medium Pirelli tyres, Verstappen was leading the Monaco Grand Prix by a comfortable margin ahead of Fernando Alonso when light rain began to fall on lap 51. As that intensified, the Red Bull driver finally came in for his first pit stop of the day to swap onto a set of intermediates.

But given the slippery conditions around the tight twisty street circuit, several drivers had moments with the barriers including Verstappen who had a hard hit at Portier.

It had even ‘GP’ asking his driver why he wasn’t slowing down.

“My engineer asked me the same thing but it’s more when you’re on a rhythm,” he said when the question was put to him in the post-race press conference, “it’s better to just stay in that.

“I think just one time out of 16 I clipped the barrier. But I thought I had a bit more margin and then I just I touched those… okay, I didn’t have the margin.

“But yeah, it was fine.

“It’s better to be in a rhythm and feel good than slowing down and then be a bit out of your zone, and then also your tyres get colder.

“It’s not what you like, they were already quite cold, so which is better, I think to stay in that because I was not overdriving it or whatever, it was just in my own zone.”

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Verstappen went onto win the race by 28 seconds ahead of Alonso to record his fourth victory of this season.

There was a moment though when Alonso was able to close the gap on Verstappen, the Spaniard taking five seconds off his lead in the first five laps after they’d swapped to the inters.

Verstappen says that’s just because he was being a little cautious as he established his rhythm.

“It was just that I had a big lead and I didn’t want to risk trying to be the same pace or faster and then end up in the wall,” he explained.

“You have to be a little bit more careful. It’s just not take too much risk but at the same time, of course not drive too slowly.

“I think I had Lando [Norris] in my gearbox as well so at one point, I was like, well, I do need to speed up a bit.

“It’s not a comfortable situation to be in, when it’s like that to run here in the wet but luckily after five laps to change a few things on the steering wheel as well to just give me a bit of a better balance and that definitely helped as well.”

Verstappen’s victory extends his advantage over his team-mate Sergio Perez to 39 points in the battle for the World title.

Sergio Perez’s crash at Ste. Devote on Saturday allowed the F1 world a good look at the floor of his Red Bull RB19, including Lewis Hamilton.

The Red Bull driver made a critical error just seven minutes into the qualifying hour on Saturday, missing his braking point into Turn 1 and hitting the barriers hard enough to rip a corner off his car.

Coming so early in qualifying, the mistake doomed Perez to a 20th-place grid start and the Mexican failed to make much forward progress over the course of the Grand Prix itself.

Even worse for Red Bull, the recovery of Perez’s car meant a crane operator hoisted the RB19 high into the sky, allowing keen-eyed photographers to snap detailed pictures of the floor design that is the envy of the F1 field and will allow for careful analysis amongst the technical chiefs at rival teams.

The incident came just hours after Mercedes’ Lewis Hamilton had offered photographers a similar opportunity when he crashed his W14 at Mirabeau, an incident that engineering chief Andrew Shovlin moved to downplay as he said Red Bull would likely be far more annoyed than Mercedes at having their secrets exposed.

Reflecting on the weekend’s action on the Chequered Flag podcast , host Rosanna Tennant revealed she’d had a brief chat with Lewis Hamilton about the incident, and that the seven-time World Champion had paid close attention to the RB19’s floor design when it was revealed to the world.

“Lewis Hamilton was joking with me that he’s saved the photos of the floor of the Red Bull on his phone, and he’ll looking at them very closely, zooming in,” Tennant laughed as she spoke with guests Harry Benjamin and Jolyon Palmer.

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Benjamin then said he believes Mercedes will be satisfied to come away with fourth and fifth place in Monte Carlo, having introduced a significant upgrade package to the car despite the unique demands of the tight street circuit.

“I think Mercedes will be happy that they managed to have a fairly solid clean weekend,” he said.

“Yeah, there were a couple of skirmishes with the wall but, Spain up next, that is a track where you can properly get the data for these upgrades and the result of a fourth and fifth of Monaco will buoy them up for that.”

Palmer, a former F1 racer with Renault, was less positive about Mercedes’ weekend, saying that it was more a case of strategic nous, rather than outright performance, that gave them a reasonable points haul.

“No, I don’t think you can say that,” he said, when asked if the upgrades had helped the team move forward.

“Maybe they have, but we’ll find out next week when we’re on a better track – a better test track for it in Barcelona. They were just an example of a team getting things roughly right with strategy and they didn’t do anything special.

“In fact, Russell had a golden opportunity to take the podium when he stayed out, and did one stop in the race but then made a mistake and then hit Perez and got a five-second penalty for the reg-join.

“But going through that run-off at Mirabeau cost George Russell a great chance of actually beating Esteban Ocon and taking a podium from eighth on the grid. So that would have been something – fourth and fifth is solid.

“I guess they beat Ferraris which got the strategy wrong pitting for the intermediates, but kind of not a huge amount more than that. They’ll be disappointed that, on merit this weekend, Ocon has beaten them.”