Since Fernando Alonso‘s podium finishes in 2023 with Aston Martin, the Asturian driver has had to deal with a car that has been stagnating update after update and year after year. While other teams have been taking steps forward, some bigger than others, Fernando Alonso has had to settle for staying behind on the grid, but that hasn’t stopped him from performing miracle after miracle, as he himself says, to get the Aston Martin as high up as possible. In the current season, Alonso has already shown his great work in two of the five races contested so far to avoid being the worst car on the grid.
Alonso narrowly misses out on points in Yeddah
Fernando Alonso arrived at the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix hoping that the car would perform better than in the previous four races. This was predicted by the data available to Aston Martin for the race. However, the reality on the track put things in perspective: the AMR25 was a car with the worst top speed on the grid, very unstable and very difficult to drive.
Fernando Alonso himself admitted that the race in Jeddah was one of those where there was a small miracle, races that will not be remembered by fans, but in which he got more out of the car than it had. As we said, with the slowest car on the fastest circuit of the season, he finished just one place off the points, in eleventh. The Asturian driver himself had this to say after the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix:
“It consumes you inside to do 50 qualifying laps, I don’t know how to race any other way. We gave it our all, it’s in our DNA. It doesn’t matter if I’m fighting for the championship, for the podium, for P14… I’m guaranteed to give 100% every time, as if it were the race that decides the world championship.” ‘It’s been very painful, sad.’ ”It will be difficult to score a point this year, but we’ll try.”
Second miracle of the season after Japan
But Yeddah wasn’t the only miracle for the Asturian this season. In Japan, the third race of the championship, after the first two retirements in Australia and China, he arrived under pressure to finish the Grand Prix and prove he was in good shape, and he did just that. He managed to overcome the poor performance of the AMR25 to finish eleventh, with his teammate last and where clearly the Aston Martin was the worst car of the 20 on the track. In that race, the driver himself described his position as a “miracle.”
“I guess we’re not fast enough to be in the top 18, so finishing eleventh is a small miracle.” “I got the most out of the car and a little bit more.” “We don’t have enough pace, we have the slowest car on the straight, I hope we can make progress.”
Other miracles by Fernando Alonso in 2024
The Asturian driver has accustomed us to always expecting the best from him, and seeing him in the back of the pack does not inspire admiration in many fans, but last season, he had two other races that he described as miraculous. One of them was the Singapore Grand Prix, where he finished eighth.
“But today, and again, in complete transparency, none of our estimates predicted that we would finish where we finished. Now we could say that the predictions are bad. They usually work pretty well, and I think we made good predictions today.”
And in Japan last season, he also achieved an outstanding result in qualifying, finishing fifth, which allowed him to be at the front of the race.
“I did a lap in Q3 that was above my capabilities.” ‘When you’re on that edge between good and bad, it can go either way, and today it went my way,’ he said after qualifying. He managed to finish sixth in the race, which he described as one of the best races of his life.
“It’s definitely one of the five best races I’ve ever done. No one will remember Suzuka 2024. I finished sixth and was fifth in qualifying, but I think we clearly have the fifth-best car. Red Bull and Ferrari are in another league, and McLaren and Mercedes are ahead, so our natural position is ninth and tenth.” ”We finished fifth yesterday, a small miracle, sixth today, a big miracle. I’ll always remember this race, but as I said, it will be forgotten by the general public in two or three days.”
Fernando Alonso has been battling adversity for two years, adversity that is getting worse with each passing season, but he continues to show that he has more than enough talent to keep fighting.