Alonso hails ‘probably the best Friday’ of 2025 so far for Aston Martin after strong start in Singapore

Fernando Alonso was naturally encouraged by his and Aston Martin’s performance on the first day of practice for the Singapore Grand Prix, saying the team feel “more optimistic” about their chances than at the last two races.

With the AMR25 tending to perform better on high-downforce layouts this season, such as the Hungaroring and Zandvoort, Alonso hit the ground running at the Marina Bay Street Circuit to impressively top first practice and place fourth in FP2.

It comes after two trickier weekends for Aston Martin at the low-downforce Monza and Baku City Circuit – the Silverstone-based squad aiming to return to points-scoring ways and improve on their current P7 spot in the Teams’ Championship.

“It seems a little bit better than the previous Grands Prix,” Alonso declared at the end of Friday’s running, before outlining how there are some obvious additional gains to be made overnight.

“Let’s try to fine-tune the set-up; it’s still not in a happy place, especially on the front axle, still a little bit too much understeer. It’s something to work on tonight.

“But I think it’s a good start, and let’s see what we can do tomorrow.”

Alonso, who has a pole position and two wins to his name around Marina Bay, added: “I think since the first lap in FP1 we were in a comfortable place, and we were able to find the limits quite quickly.

“In FP2 obviously the red flags didn’t help to see the full picture, so I don’t know the top teams if they put the lap together or not, but let’s see if we can be in Q3 tomorrow and [score] points on Sunday.

“I think both sessions in the top four, probably it’s the best Friday so far. But as I said, sometimes on Friday we run with different programmes than the others, or different fuel.

“It’s not the first time that happened, so the real test is tomorrow in Qualifying. But we are a little bit more optimistic than the previous two races.”

Alonso’s team mate, Lance Stroll, had a relatively low-key FP1 session but also made it into the top-six positions when the sun set and the floodlights switched on for FP2.

“Some good laps today,” said the Canadian. “We learnt a lot. I think we improved the car from the beginning of the day to the end of the day, so that was good.

“It was very different [in FP2], for sure. With the temperature dropping, the sun coming down, it was a very different track. But I had a good feeling in the car, we were competitive in that session, so we’ll see what we can do tomorrow.”