"How crazy. You never get me right." This is how Alonso and Sainz were knocked out at Silverstone.

When Formula 1 wants to roll the dice, it makes you hostage to an energy beyond your control. And where you have room for maneuver, you shouldn't fail. In both cases, Fernando Alonso. In the first, Carlos Sainz. A British Grand Prix that snatched a magnificent result from the Spanish drivers' fingers and gifted a victory to the slower of the two McLaren drivers, Lando Norris . Such a crazy race that the driver starting from the back row achieved his first podium finish after 239 Formula 1 races (congratulations to Hulkenberg ).

The Grand Prix was exciting and uncertain, marked by the capricious rain and the perceptiveness or inaccuracy of pit stops, and by incidents on the track, but it left the Spaniards with serious expressions and long faces, even with Alonso in ninth. Sainz was just as on target, yet, on the other hand, he continued digging one of the deepest holes of his career in his relationship with the goddess of fortune. Now, it was an out-of-control Leclerc who ruined his points.

"For us, it's a missed opportunity; we've executed something poorly," Alonso said. "It's the story of our season. So far, perhaps a little tiresome, but I hope our luck changes at some point," Sainz repeated to himself, just another Grand Prix.

"How crazy that you never get me right."

The Spaniards lined up one after another from the start, using intermediates, seventh and eighth on the third lap. However, the asphalt was drying out, leaving a complicated dilemma hanging in the air: enter ahead of your rivals and take to the wet track on slicks, or try to hold out until the rain started again, albeit with the intermediates destroyed. Alonso paid dearly for the wrong answer to this dilemma, which arose twice during the race.

"The truth is that the race was complicated, difficult to read, the ground was very slippery at the beginning, when we were on the intermediate stages, then that big downpour came with the safety car, and the visibility got really bad, we couldn't see anything. Honestly, it was a difficult race to run," the Asturian summed up at the finish.

Even so, both stopped on lap 12 to remount intermediates. The Asturian had intended to attempt an undercut , stopping early, as Aston Martin would have gotten Stroll right, who even ran third. But after his first stop, upon returning to the track, Alonso discovered he had lost positions. "It's crazy that you never get me right." Perhaps his engineers remembered the opportunity and wanted to avoid the same mistake at the final stop. They wouldn't get it right either.

"Two or three laps too late"

The race continued its orgy, playing with teams and drivers. With track exits and safety cars deployed (one even to neutralize the amount of rain), by lap 35 Alonso was eighth and Sainz ninth, both heading for the points with the final pit stop to fit slicks remaining, as no more rain was forecast. Here their paths began to diverge, although more so for the Madrid native, in that shared destination toward the points that both had held throughout the race .

“The first stop has more explanation, or more excuses, let's say. Because Hamilton, Russell, Gasly , and I were in that group of cars, we were fifth to eighth. And it's difficult to take risks when you're fifth, sixth, or seventh, than when you're 16th,” the Asturian explained, “but we did stop very late, although it's more understandable because we all stopped at the same time. In other words, we all made mistakes, so to speak, in that group and started behind Esteban, Nico... So the first stop was two or three laps too late, and the second, two or three laps too early.” This was the crux of the matter.

"Three or four laps earlier"

At Aston Martin, they may have wanted to reverse the roles with Alonso, and now, at the second stop, they took a chance on the pits before their rivals, the first driver to run slicks when the track was still wet. If the first stop meant he lost a possible top-five spot (Reason, Stroll, who had been eliminated in Q1), the second dealt the final blow to the Asturian.

"I lost 25 seconds in three laps, so it was three or four laps earlier than it should have been. But the team calls you into the pits and has more data than you do, all the lap times being recorded in the intermediate conditions." Alonso was giving the team a helping hand, or perhaps it was irony.

"At that point, we had a lot of graining. The team has the tire temperatures, they saw they were dropping, they have the lap times, the laps from last year, when there was a similar situation, so they know how the lap times were evolving and when it was time to stop. And they decided that was the time, and then..." In other words, despite all this information, it still backfired...

Perhaps this is where Alonso's final dig at his pit wall comes in. "I find it hard to understand why we have another car giving us information [Stroll's], and if he's up to third, I don't know how, but from this side of the garage we can get some information . We have it at home, but hey, as I say, strategy works out well, other times it doesn't. A week ago in Austria, one stop allowed us to pick up points that we perhaps weren't in a position to do, and today the strategy deprived us of some." Too soon, too late.

"If someone comes and hits you..."

Sainz was on the right track, satisfied with a strategy that cleared the path to points. "We did well. Yes, there were some who might have done even better, a few laps before or after putting on the slicks or intermediates," explained the Madrid native. "But if we were seventh or eighth when we'd already changed the slicks and it was going to be a little train from there to the end, we hadn't done badly, so you have to be happy with that part. But if someone comes along and hits you, well, there's nothing you can do."

That was Charles Leclerc, who was driving ahead of Sainz and, after losing control when entering the wet, lost control of his Ferrari and hit his former teammate as he charged at him to overtake him. “The moment Charles lost control on the slick at Turn 15 and hit me, and that was the end of my race because I took damage and lost the chance to score points,” the Madrid native lamented bitterly. “Even a little depressed.”

“A little tired. Not with Charles, who, poor guy, also lost his race, but it always happens to us when we're trying to score good points, finishing seventh or eighth would have been a good way to score. And then someone comes along and loses control of the car, it hits you and destroys your weekend.” And, on top of that, it destroys the wing and the side of the car.

"For some reason, these things keep happening to us. We've had so many races now where something always happens that doesn't allow us to score points or finish in the position we deserve. It's starting to get, as I said, tiresome."