F1 arrives in Europe. Italy will host the Imola F1 Grand Prix to kick off the European F1 tour, and it does so with new upgrades at Aston Martin, which will finally unveil the first updates of the season. Fernando Alonso is confident in the work being done at Silverstone, but he knows that a real improvement that will move him up several places on the grid will be difficult.
Upgrades for Fernando Alonso
Fernando Alonso’s AMR25 brings new features to kick off the European F1 tour. Fernando Alonso did not express much confidence that these upgrades will make a drastic change to a car that started the championship fighting with Sauber not to be the worst car on the track. In addition, as he warned in Miami, not only will Aston Martin bring updates, but more teams will debut new parts on their cars, so it’s a matter of theirs being better than the others, something that hasn’t happened in the last two years, when Aston Martin’s updates have been a step backwards for the team.
For the Imola GP, Fernando Alonso will, in principle, be able to test the new flat floor, the new ground effect and a new diffuser. These three updates are already ready, but the team could delay the incorporation of some of them for next week’s Monaco GP, as putting them all in at once would mean a radical change to the car and would be quite complicated to configure to get the most out of it.
Fernando Alonso’s options at Imola
How these updates will perform is anyone’s guess. Remember that Aston Martin is updating the AMR25 with parts intended for next year’s car, so these are tests and the results will only be visible after they have been tried out on the track. Therefore, there are several scenarios for Fernando Alonso this race weekend.
The negative scenario is that the updates have no effect on the car. This would mean that Fernando Alonso would continue to depend on his pace and race incidents to avoid finishing at the back of the grid. Only his talent could move him up a few positions, but finishing in the points seems unthinkable given what we have seen so far.
The positive scenario is that the new updates work perfectly. If so, Fernando Alonso’s AMR25 could gain between two and four tenths of a second per lap. This would be a significant improvement and, depending on the updates from the other teams, he could find himself fighting for the middle of the grid and battling for his first points of the season.
In Saturday’s qualifying, the priority remains to get the Aston Martin into Q2, and in the best-case scenario, pull off a magical lap that puts him in the top 10.
We shouldn’t expect miracles in F1. They do happen sometimes, but moving up the field given the car’s performance at the start of the season seems almost impossible, something unthinkable for Fernando Alonso and Aston Martin, who, as they have already acknowledged, are barely investing any resources in 2025, so there isn’t enough work behind the scenes to expect something like that to happen.
Fernando Alonso will continue to fight until the end with Aston Martin and get the most out of the AMR25, but despite the upgrades, a radical change in the car’s performance is not to be expected. What is certain is that if there is a chance to fight for a place in the top 10, Fernando Alonso will not let it slip away.