Alonso looks to continue Alpine points streak in Spain

Fernando Alonso is hopeful his two-race points scoring streak will continue when racing on home soil this weekend at the Spanish Grand Prix.

Alonso scored the first point of his F1 return with Alpine at Imola after Kimi Raikkonen was hit with a time penalty that dropped the Finn from ninth to 13th.

However, no such luck was required last time out in Portugal when Alonso produced a scintillating display in the closing stages of the race to climb the order to finish eighth, just behind team-mate Esteban Ocon.

"I am excited to be back racing in Spain," said Alonso. "It’s always special racing in your home country and I have good memories here in Barcelona.

"It’s a circuit all of us drivers know well, as we normally do our pre-season test here as well as racing the Grand Prix during the season. It’s a challenging circuit with a lot of high-speed corners.

"The race is also back to back with Portugal, so it’s nice to keep the momentum going. It’s traditionally quite a difficult circuit to overtake on, so qualifying will be very important.

"We’ll see where we are during the weekend and target a positive weekend with some more points on the board."

In the past two races, only Alpine and McLaren have scored points with both cars at both races. After Alpine failed to trouble the scoreboard in Bahrain, the recent results have been a remarkable turnaround for the team that last year finished fifth in the standings.

Alpine executive director Marcin Budkowski added: "On the back of a strong race in which we showed good pace and achieved a double points result, we want to build on this good momentum.

"Barcelona, historically, hasn’t been one of our strongest tracks, but neither was Portugal last year, so we will aim to confirm our progress by putting both cars in Q3 and scoring more points."

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