Who slept worst last night: Fernando Alonso
When Fernando Alonso became Formula 1 world champion in 2005, he was just 24 years old, replacing Emerson Fittipaldi as the youngest champion in the sport’s history. At last, Michael Schumacher had a challenger. And although the reigning king of F1 once mistakenly called the young Spanish bull “Ferdinando” because he couldn’t quite remember his name, it was Alonso who ultimately brought Schumacher’s golden era to an end.
The rookie class of 2001 was an exceptional one: Alonso, Juan Pablo Montoya, Kimi Raikkonen. Brazilian Enrique Bernoldi was also on the grid for the season opener in Melbourne, with Malaysia’s Alex Yoong and Czech driver Tomas Enge joining later in the year. Names that have largely faded into obscurity. But at least 50 per cent of the class of 2001 went on to greatness.
Formula 1 was a very different world back then. Team bosses were men like Ron Dennis, Frank Williams, Eddie Jordan and Tom Walkinshaw. Today’s world championship-winning Mercedes team was called BAR, Red Bull was still Jaguar, and Alain Prost’s team ran a Ferrari engine rebadged in the name of the computer brand Acer. Facebook and Instagram didn’t exist, grid girls in bikinis and skin-tight shorts casually held up the drivers’ numbers, and the grid still featured old warhorses like Jean Alesi and Jos Verstappen, Max’s father.
Anyone who had predicted back then that Alonso would still be among Formula 1’s best drivers 25 years later, yet would never win more than two world championships, would probably have been dismissed as a lunatic by journalists such as Murray Walker or Heinz Prüller.
I once did my civilian service in a retirement home, and whenever I told my mother about my work, she would say: “When people get old, they become like children again.” In a way, that applies to Fernando Alonso, too.
In 2001, he made his Formula 1 debut with Minardi. Australian airline entrepreneur Paul Stoddart had bought the team we now know as Racing Bulls, and Alonso scored precisely zero points in a 17-race season, with no F1 Sprints and a championship finale at Suzuka on 14 October. Not because his considerable talent wasn’t already obvious, but because the machinery simply wasn’t up to the job.
Now, as F1’s elder statesman, Alonso finds himself in exactly the same situation as when he was a Grand Prix baby: his team-mate doesn’t stand a chance against him, nobody seriously questions his ability behind the wheel, and yet he is hopelessly stuck towards the back because his car simply cannot deliver.
Fernando Alonso, Aston Martin Racing
Photo by: James Sutton / Formula 1 / Formula Motorsport Ltd via Getty Images
In between, there have been two world championships, 32 Grand Prix victories and a quarter of a century of life experience. Remarkably little has changed: Alonso is faster than his car. After 20 of 24 race weekends, he has just seven points to his name. Only in 2001, with Minardi, did he score fewer.
And yet Interlagos, the very place where he clinched his first world title in 2005, provided proof that Alonso has lost none of his ability to extract every last fraction of a second from a Formula 1 car.
When the rain arrived, opening the door for drivers in less competitive machinery to overcome their cars’ shortcomings, Alonso’s class shone through. During Saturday’s qualifying session, he briefly topped the timesheets on several occasions, eventually securing his first Q3 appearance of the season.
In Sunday’s race, he even found himself mixing it with the likes of Lewis Hamilton in the Ferrari at times. Afterwards, Alonso suggested that the Aston Martin must have been “phenomenal” in the corners on a wet track (the Honda engine, admittedly, rather less so).
Perhaps. But here’s the thing: it was only phenomenal in Alonso’s hands.
On Saturday, Alonso showed why he still belongs in Formula 1 at 45. On Sunday, Aston Martin showed him why, at 45, he might be better off doing something else. The result was 12th place. No points. Another weekend in which Alonso proved he is too good for his car.
All of which should be enough to stroke his ego and help him sleep soundly at night. But however hard Alonso tries, and however little anyone doubts his ability, the chances of him becoming world champion for a third time and finally writing a happy ending to a fairy tale that has turned into a never-ending story over the past two decades are slim.
Fernando Alonso, Aston Martin Racing
Photo by: Hector Vivas / Formula 1 via Getty Images
There are few drivers in Formula 1 who, over the years, have raced for so many of today’s top teams, or at least held talks with them at some point. At Ferrari, he came agonisingly close to a third title, but it never quite happened. At McLaren, he left scorched earth behind him. Twice.
His talks with Red Bull were at their most serious in 2007, or at least that’s what Helmut Marko once told me. Red Bull had Adrian Newey, but Alonso apparently lacked the confidence that Dietrich Mateschitz’s bold vision of taking on the established teams and manufacturers could actually become reality. By the time Red Bull began its rise towards an era of extraordinary success in 2009, Alonso was already preparing to move to Ferrari.
The irony? Almost 20 years later, Alonso is now pinning his hopes of becoming world champion again on none other than Adrian Newey at Aston Martin. The very designer whose potential at Red Bull he apparently underestimated all those years ago. It should make for fascinating material in his long-promised autobiography, which I pre-ordered on Amazon in July 2021 and which, to this day, has still not been published.
In late 2016, during one of the lowest periods of his long career at McLaren-Honda, when he had already begun to mentally move on from Formula 1, reigning world champion Nico Rosberg suddenly announced his retirement. That very evening, at the FIA prize-giving gala, Flavio Briatore called Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff in an attempt to secure Rosberg’s vacant seat for Alonso. But Alonso had burned too many bridges during his time at McLaren-Mercedes, and Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche had not forgotten “Spygate”.
Sometimes Alonso opened the wrong door. Sometimes it was slammed in his face. And sometimes he had slammed it so hard himself that, years later, it could no longer be opened.
When Alonso joined Aston Martin in 2023 and immediately scored eight podium finishes in his first season, it seemed he had finally shaken off the curse of bad timing. Today, three years later, we know better. And it would hardly be surprising if the team eventually became successful years after his departure. Just as McLaren did.
Alonso wasn’t always simply the victim of unfortunate circumstances. Some doors he closed himself. Some bridges he burned with his own hands.
Lewis Hamilton, McLaren, Fernando Alonso, McLaren
Photo by: Timothy A. Clary / AFP via Getty Images
Alonso isn’t someone who loses sleep easily. He has experienced too much, achieved too much and proved too much to all of us to get worked up simply because he will never win a third world championship in this lifetime. And yet there is something deeply regrettable about his story. Had he been as fortunate as Vettel or Hamilton in finding himself in the right place at the right time, he could probably have five or more world championships to his name by now. But he doesn’t.
Back in 2001, when Alonso was starting out in Formula 1, the newspaper articles I read would invariably describe the great Sir Stirling Moss as the finest Grand Prix driver never to have won a world championship.
Perhaps, at some point in the distant future, they will write about Fernando Alonso as the finest Grand Prix driver ever to have won “only” two world championships.
Still, things could be worse.
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