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Fernando Alonso: Formula 1’s greatest showman
3 years ago
Alonso is the most experienced F1 driver of all time
Longevity, for one thing. His physiotherapist says he has the body of a man 10 years his junior, which goes some way to explaining how he has become F1’s most experienced driver. He made his F1 debut in March 2001 – a month before F1’s current youngest driver, Oscar Piastri, was born – and is now contesting his 20th year (he sat out the 2002, 2019 and 2020 seasons). After all that time, the fire within seems to burn no less brightly now than it did back then.
Longevity on its own, however, doesn’t tell us a great deal. Plenty of F1 drivers have struggled on long after it would have been prudent to stop, like tired old boxers hoping in vain to rediscover their glory days. But not Fernando. A third of the way through the 2023 season, Alonso is third in the drivers’ standings having scored five podiums in seven races. An F1 driver for half his life, Alonso appears to be as quick, and as hungry, as ever.
"Was there any other version of Fernando Alonso that would willingly sit behind his teammate in the final laps without fighting for position, gladly forgoing an extra point or two for the good of the team, as this Alonso did in Spain last weekend?"
He’s driven more race miles in F1 cars than anybody, upwards of 60,000 in fact, equal to almost two and a half times around the world. Add qualifying, practice and test sessions and he’s probably circumnavigated the globe more times than a retiring British Airways pilot. He’s driven for half the teams on the grid – Aston Martin, Alpine, Ferrari and McLaren, plus Minardi, which became Toro Rosso, now AlphaTauri. I think I saw one Alonso fan in a grandstand at the weekend wearing an Aston baseball cap and a Ferrari shirt, waving an Alpine flag.
So he’s been around for a very long time. More importantly, there has been plenty of success over the years, much of it front-loaded to the start of his career. After five seasons in F1 he was a double World Champion, winner of 15 Grands Prix. The following 14 and a bit seasons have brought 17 more race wins so far, but that third title remains elusive. It’s amazing to think he’s been stuck on two for so long. Midway through the 2006 season, a long way clear at top of the standings having dropped only six points, he must have seemed on course for a record-breaking career. But he switched from Renault to McLaren for 2007, found himself paired with a hotshot young rookie called Hamilton and, well, that particular tale has been told often enough already.
"Time and again he has shown that common trait of all great racing drivers – awareness. He always seems to know exactly what’s going on in a race, as though he’s sitting on the pit wall with several screens and reams of data before him, not in a Formula 1 car flying along at 200mph or more"
Does Alonso deserve more than two World Championships? Probably. He has come agonisingly close more than once. Had he scored just 11 more points during his career, he could have been champion five times over.
What damage was done to his reputation by being beaten by Lewis Hamilton in his debut year (in fact they scored the same number of points and wins, but Lewis won on count back) was surely undone to some degree by running Red Bull’s Sebastian Vettel so damn close in 2012 in a far inferior Ferrari. Time and again, Fernando has dragged unwilling machines kicking and screaming to podiums and wins to which they had no right. Maybe that has been the defining characteristic of his career.
Or is it his extraordinarily high racing IQ? Alonso bends the rules almost to snapping point, knowing precisely how far they can be pushed. More than once, most recently at the Monaco Grand Prix last month, on a critical in-lap with a position to be maintained or a competitor to leapfrog, Fernando has – how should one put this? – strategically out-braked himself into a chicane, going straight on instead of taking the proper, slower way round. It can save whole seconds. Make it look like an honest mistake and there’s really nothing the stewards can do, other than warn him about track limits. It’s probably about as close to cheating without actually breaking any rules as it’s possible to get.
Or how about lap one of the 2021 Russian Grand Prix? Rather than following the leaders through turns two and three, he dived down an escape road, got a storming run into turn four and stayed right on the tail of the leading pack. Again, no rules were broken, but an advantage was most certainly had.
Time and again he has shown that common trait of all great racing drivers – awareness. He always seems to know exactly what’s going on in a race, as though he’s sitting on the pit wall with several screens and reams of data before him, not in a Formula 1 car flying along at 200mph or more. Mid-race at the Miami Grand Prix last month he watched on a huge trackside screen as Lance Stroll passed another car, congratulated his teammate over the radio then continued on his way to the podium.
Alonso’s world reaches far beyond Formula 1. He led the Indy 500 for 27 laps in 2017, on debut, only retiring when his engine blew in the closing stages. He has competed on the gruelling Dakar Rally, started the 24 Hour of Le Mans twice – winning on both occasions – and he’s won the World Endurance Championship and the Daytona 24 Hours. He may not have triumphed in every form of racing he has turned his hand to, but he has always been competitive at the very least. Having the mind to compete in disciplines other than F1 marks Alonso out from many of his more blinkered rivals.
But what’s really made him so compelling to watch all these years is his character. He has been almost schizophrenic at times, swinging from jovial to tempestuous the way most of us go from sitting down to standing up. He’ll be in repose on a folding chair one moment, winking playfully at the camera, and roaring down the radio about GP2 engines the next. He’s played more roles in F1 than any other driver, from the precocious talent scoring podiums in only his second season in Formula 1 in 2003, to the great usurper, finally ending Michael Schumacher’s years of dominance in 2005.
"Plenty of F1 drivers have struggled on long after it would have been prudent to stop, like tired old boxers hoping in vain to rediscover their glory days. But not Fernando. A third of the way through the 2023 season, Alonso is third in the drivers’ standings having scored five podiums in seven races. An F1 driver for half his life, Alonso appears to be as quick, and as hungry, as ever"
He’s played the villain more than once, not least at McLaren in 2007. Blocking Lewis Hamilton in the pitlane during qualifying to settle a score was the most public act of disobedience, but there was so much more going on behind the scenes. It has since been reported far and wide that Alonso threatened that very same weekend to blow the Spygate scandal, which had been bubbling away beneath the surface for weeks, wide open if McLaren didn’t intentionally run Hamilton out of fuel in the race. In the end, it didn’t come to that.
Talking of scandals, who among us can say with absolute certainty, with not a hint of doubt in our minds, that Alonso knew nothing in advance of the Crashgate saga that meant he won the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix in a midfield Renault?
More than once Alonso has been ruthlessly Machiavellian, the master operator, outmanoeuvring very capable minds to engineer moves from one team to another. Just ask Alpine CEO Laurent Rossi and team principal Otmar Szafnauer, who expected Alonso to sign a one-year contract for 2023 and were certain they had highly rated youngster Oscar Piastri waiting in the wings if he didn’t. Fernando’s manoeuvrings meant they found themselves with neither, wondering what the hell had just happened.
And now, at his new team Aston Martin, Alonso is playing the role of adopted big brother to Stroll, all of a sudden the model team player. Was there any other version of Fernando Alonso that would willingly sit behind his teammate in the final laps without fighting for position, gladly forgoing an extra World Championship point or two for the good of the team, at his home Grand Prix no less, as this Alonso did in Spain last weekend? In all of this, and perhaps most amazingly of all, Alonso has cast himself as the plucky underdog, taking on the might of a dominant Red Bull team almost single handedly.
How many more roles can he possibly play before he calls time on his racing career? There must be one or two big performances left in him; a little more character development still to come; one last twist in his fascinating narrative arc.
I have never met Alonso in person, but I did once get to ask him a question by video call. This was early in 2021, on the eve of his return to Formula 1 with Alpine after two years out. I asked if he was stepping back into a Formula 1 car after dabbling with so many other forms of racing because he felt deep down, knew right down in his core, that he should be at least a triple F1 World Champion, and this might be a chance to make that so. ‘Honestly, no,’ he told me. ‘When I sat down and looked at all of my options for 2021, F1 with Alpine was the most interesting.’ I believed him then and I still do now.
There is so much we all want to know about Alonso, like whether he’ll ever win a 33rd Grand Prix or a third title, and how long he can possibly go on racing in Formula 1. But for me there is only one question, and it’s the same one I’ve been asking for years: what on earth is Fernando Alonso going to do next?
