Alex Dunne on the harrowing abuse he faced following Monaco GP crash
Speaking to The Race, the Offaly teenager accepted the blame for the crash in Monte Carlo which left him with multiple grid penalties for the Barcelona sprint and feature races last weekend.
He said: 'I don't think there's any point in me commenting on Monaco really, what happened, happened.
'But I think moving forward, it's clear in these scenarios, maybe sometimes you just need to rein it back a bit.
'Everyone knows Monaco Turn 1, if you come out in the lead, the chance of you finishing there is pretty high.
'Everyone around me is still pushing me on, McLaren and the team are still fully behind me and happy with how I'm doing. So yeah, couple of things to change but should be fine.'
He was then asked whether his comeback drive from P19 to 2nd had silenced his critics.
He didn't know, as the abuse he received after the events of the Monaco feature race forced him to delete social media from his phone.
'I got a lot of stuff after Monaco, normally I'm not someone who reads things and gets annoyed by them," he said.
'But, I think an hour after the race, I deleted social media off my phone because I've ever received such bad messages in my life.
'A lot of the stuff I got was really, really bad and quite upsetting to be honest. But you know, I think...'
His answer trailed off after this as he became visibly emotional before the interview moved onto other topics.
McLaren F1 team principal Andrea Stella - who takes charge of the McLaren Driver Development Programme, of which the 19-year-old is a member - told The Race 'Alex is doing very well, he's a very fast driver, very talented, and the situation he had in Monaco was one of those situations where you can learn a lot.
'If we think, multiple world champions they went through situations that were very important to finetune the way they go racing.
'The way he raced today, the way he managed to overtake cars in a very clean way in the first lap, stay calm and see how the situation would have evolved, and capitalise when the opportunity came, was an immediate response to the situation he had in Monaco, and the pressure that came from these social media comments, for me that's something that makes me very proud of him.
'I think it was genuine. I think we need to realise that we live in a difficult world in which people can attack people really with no foundation, sometimes no competence, so we're completely behind Alex, not only on track but also off-track from this point of view."
While it would be great to get an Irish driver on the F1 grid, it may be a ways away yet, with a McLaren promotion unlikely until at least 2027 when Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris's contracts run out.
If the opportunity arises, though, it may be difficult to look past the Offaly man, with his performances in the F2 championship, specifically his ability to bounce back from his Monaco blip, beginning to turn heads in the sport.
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