The Canadian has scored only 47 points so far in 2023 compared to the 183 of Alonso, and a series of incidents – notably the huge qualifying crash in Singapore that caused him to miss the race – have not helped.
Then, last time out in Qatar, he caused controversy when TV cameras caught him throwing away his steering wheel and then seemingly pushing his trainer after he failed to make it through Q1.
Alonso says he is trying to help Stroll to solve his issues in whatever way he can.
“We are all helping him,” said Alonso. “I'm trying to do my best as well, my part.
“If I find something in the car that I feel more comfortable, I'm obviously listening to all the debriefs, because we are together in the same room.
“Whatever difficulty that he's expressing, I'm trying to remember what could have been a help for me in the past, or in set-up or whatever.
“So yeah, we are working very close together to find the right path for the team, and try to score points with both cars.”
Alonso insisted that there have been signs of speed from Stroll recently, even if that hasn’t translated into results.
“I think he's been extremely unlucky with some situations,” said the Spaniard. “I think the pace and the speed is not that far when everything goes normal, like in the race in Qatar, the race in Japan, we were within one tenth of the second.
“When he was doing this tremendous comeback from 17th to ninth in Suzuka he had the rear wing failure.
“So all this is just hitting your confidence because, it's like in football, when you went two or three matches, everything goes perfect. When you lose two or three matches, you start getting stress, and you try to deliver the job in the next one. So we need a clean weekend.
“Qualifying especially is the most intense part of the of the weekend at the moment, with Q1 being so tight, the field, if you have an unlucky out-lap, if you have anything that affects those laps, then the race weekend is compromised when you start at the back.
“So we just need a clean weekend. And hopefully this one is the starting point.”
Alonso admits that it won't be easy to optimise the car in Austin with the limited running available on a sprint weekend, but he remains optimistic about the team's chances.
“The biggest challenge for us is, as usual, the sprint format,” he said. “You only have FP1, so a couple of laps where you need to set up the car, and then make further decisions between FP1 and qualifying, which normally are just a guess, that everything will work fine.
“Something that may work fine for qualifying on one lap, it doesn't fit for the race on Sunday, but you need to guess all these compromises.
“So this is the challenge that we face, it's the same for everybody.
“We have some new parts as well, like most of the people. We talk about our own stuff, but I know that Haas I read that they have also a new car, AlphaTauri new floor, Mercedes, everybody trying to bring upgrades to the car.
“And then you have only one session, which obviously is not enough to optimise everything.”
