Alonso on his renewed F1 challenge
“WE’RE WAITING AND HOPING FOR REVOLUTION IN 2022. THAT’S WHAT WE ALL WANT”
And his legend continues, after a period of years in which he has added sporting tales that few of his grand prix racing peers can match. Yes, Alonso is still a driver worth listening to. Thanks to his time racing Indycars, sportscars and off-road machines, he’s perhaps uniquely placed to comment on modern motorsport – which, of course, he’s not afraid to do.
There’s naturally a debate to be had about ageing superstars retaining a place in motorsport’s top tier, when these days so many young drivers never reach it (although perhaps not so much in 2021, a year in which three rookies have progressed from Formula 2). But Alonso’s star status is unwavering, even as he continues one of F1’s hardest tasks: making a successful comeback with Alpine.
What Alonso is trying to do, and what he brings to F1 just by being him, demonstrates his worth to the championship.
Because of who he is, people pay attention – and well they might.
“It’s a challenge,” he says of his F1 return. “And it’s a challenge this year also because of the midfield timing. Normally, it has been a challenge. But your team or your position was quite defined. A supreme weekend doing 105 per cent, or a bad weekend performing 90 per cent, normally you can be between ninth or 11th. While this year, with the midfield as it is, you can be seventh or 15th, [with a difference of just] 0.2 seconds, if you don’t perform perfectly right. We need to go for that perfection every weekend.”
Autosport is part of a small group of media speaking to Alonso ahead of his first home F1 race since 2018 – the recent Spanish Grand Prix. It’s something of a ‘classic’ Alonso media meeting – there’s self-aggrandisement, withering assessment of the media itself, the barest hint of point-scoring against one of his former teams. But, of course, there’s fascinating substance too, offered by an experienced and engaging character.
In the race at Barcelona, Alonso came home 17th – the worst result of his comeback so far. But that doesn’t tell the real story.
His 2021 got off to a difficult start. Alonso missed Alpine’s rebranding pre-season launch event after being hit by a car while cycling. He suffered a fractured jaw and had to have a pair of titanium plates inserted in surgery following the incident. This, plus the restrictions on travel to the UK at the time, also meant that he was only able to return to Alpine’s simulator shortly before the restricted pre-season testing began. At the same time, his Alpine squad was grappling with “a few issues in the windtunnel that slowed us in terms of development”, according to team executive director Marcin Budkowski.
The team was struggling with the impact of the tweaked rear floor rules for this year, and it was an issue that was compounded by a hardware problem in the tunnel itself. The knock-on effect for Alpine was that it fell several weeks behind in its pre-season preparations and design development.
In Bahrain testing, the team appeared somewhat understated as it worked to assess how the new aerodynamic rules were working in practice. But it was clear that things weren’t looking as promising as
FORMULA 1 IS BETTER OFF HAVING FERNANDO ALONSO INVOLVED. THE DOUBLE WORLD CHAMPION HAS STILL GOT IT.
“I HAD ONE WEEKEND WHERE I WAS NOT TOTALLY COMFORTABLE – IN IMOLA. BUT IT WAS NOT ONLY ME. I’M NOT WORRIED”
they had when 2020 ended, a moment where the former Renault squad was buoyed by its three late-season podiums with Daniel Ricciardo and Esteban Ocon. In the season-opener at the same venue, this translated into no points and the sixth fastest car.
Alonso impressed by making it through to Q3 at that Bahrain event, before retiring due to remarkable bad luck, with a sandwich wrapper trapped in a rear brake duct. But the second race of his comeback was the chaos at Imola, where Alonso qualified at the back of Q2, damaged his front wing going off at Tosa in the pre-race rain, spun in the early moments of the race suspension following the George Russell and Valtteri Bottas crash, and eventually took an on-the-road 11th behind Ocon.
“I had one weekend where I was not totally comfortable – in Imola,” Alonso explains. “And the problem is that in Formula 1 there is a lot of media, a lot of articles, and unfortunately two weeks between races. Because, if it was back to back from
Imola to Portugal, there [would have been] much less talk!
“And it was also a coincidence of not only me, but a few other drivers not being totally confident in Imola. Some of them, they changed team this year. And that was a coincidence that induced a lot of talk. But, overall, I’m not overthinking too much of this, not worried too much.”
At the same time, Alpine’s early-season place in the pecking order reinforces the perception that 2021 is all about building to what comes next: F1’s 2022 rules reset. Alonso acknowledges that this is “difficult to say” because “every weekend you are on a race track, you are just a competitive person, and you want to deliver and you want to perform well”. The gladiator element of his