© Vladimir Rys

Alex’s Portimão PreviewJust a few days out from the first Formula One Portuguese Grand Prix in 24 years, we sit down with Alex to get his thoughts on the sport’s newest circuit – the Autódromo Internacional do Algarve.

“Ummm… Is it ‘Portimow’ or ‘Portimayo?” Alex is asked as the Team wonders of the circuit’s more familiar name. “I say ‘Portimow’. That sounds right to me,” confirms .

Whether you go for a suffix that sounds like a Chinese communist revolutionary or the abbreviated form of a dressing Belgians love to partner with fries (and Alex is right: the former is the one most commonly found on pronunciation audio guides), one thing is for sure: Alex reckons F1 drivers are in for a rollercoaster ride of a weekend at the undulating 4.6km Portimão circuit in the hills above the Algarve coast.

“It’s a really cool track and a cool place,” he smiles. “When you look over the circuit you can see a lot of it and the first thing that hits you is the elevation change. It’s massive; really impressive.”

Completed in October 2008, Portimão’s circuit does that thing good circuit design seems to rely on: start with a hill and get rid of anything that doesn’t look like a race track. Featuring a varied and demanding set of corners the circuit rises and falls across the hilly landscape with often alarming rapidity, as Alex recalls from his last visit there, in Formula 3 in 2015.

Alex Ready To Race© Getty Images

“I can’t remember the corner names but around turns seven, eight and nine, you go up a hill and it’s almost blind and you feel like the car is going to take off,” he says. “Then it drops down and you go down through a flat left down the hill and then it rises up steeply into a completely blind corner. You turn in, you brake and you don’t know where you are going and then the corner appears on the right and then it drops down massively again on the right. It’s really impressive.”

So, overall Alex is a fan of the circuit layout. “There is run-off, like any of the new tracks have, but because of the way the gradient is, because of the type of corners it has – blind corners on entry – and also because it’s very bumpy, it adds quite a lot of character. It doesn’t necessarily feel like a new track.”

“I’m really excited to go there. From the sound of it, Portugal is very passionate about motorsport but also it’s a cool track and it has a good character and flow to it.

“We’re also doing a configuration that is not that good for overtaking. But we said that about Mugello and we saw what happened there!”

Mugello was of course where Alex grabbed his maiden podium finish and the Thai driver reckons that new tracks are tailor made for F1’s relative newcomers.

“It will be good because I think, as we saw in Mugello, new tracks are fun. It rolls the dice a bit in terms of teams being able to adapt to the circuit. I think it gives opportunities for less experienced drivers because we’re used to going to new tracks all the time and then you have the experienced drivers who’ve done the same circuits day in, day out, so it puts the ball a bit more into our court, which is fun. It gives us a bit more of an even playing field, let’s say, going into FP1.”

And that means he’s looking forward to the challenge. “We’re all going to enjoy it,” he concludes. “It’s going to be hot, and it’s bumpy, which makes it hard physically and the speed of the corners is high. It’s good. It’s going to be a proper circuit!”

Alex In The RB16© Vladimir Rys