Fernando Alonso is aware that next year will be one of the last opportunities in his career to once again be crowned F1 world champion, and he has good reason to think so. Aston Martin has undergone many changes in recent years, and it seems that the first fruits of a project set to explode in 2026 are now beginning to show.
Fernando Alonso and the arrival of Adrian Newey
Fernando Alonso has wanted to share a team with Adrian Newey for years, and the engineer feels the same way about him. Finally, this year, they have been able to join forces in what could be the Oviedo native’s last chance to return to the top of F1. In an interview with Mundo Deportivo over the weekend in Monte Carlo, Fernando Alonso explained what it means to work with the most successful engineer in F1 history.
“Adrian is a very special person. Exactly that. He is a genius who is unlike anything I have ever worked with before.”
“He’s someone who has an above-average creative ability. He has a vision of what a race car is, with a different perspective from the rest of us mortals, and he has the ability to design everything, whether it’s aerodynamics, the structure of the car, safety, or the suspension. If you leave him here in Monaco for a minute, he’ll design a boat and float it.”
“He’s the kind of person whose life is inventiveness, whose life is design, and the way he thinks and the way he speaks is different and very educational. He teaches you. Every word you hear from Newey is a new lesson.”
The complicated world of F1
But Fernando Alonso is emphatic and dampens expectations. In his statements to Mundo Deportivo, he insists that F1 is a very complicated world where things rarely go as planned. The arrival of Adrian Newey, the new Aston Martin factory in Silverstone, the new simulator, the new wind tunnel, and the arrival of other important people and engineers from the world of F1 is a step forward, but it does not guarantee success, although it does make it more feasible.
“F1 isn’t just one plus one. If it were, it would be very easy to win in Formula 1. You would always take the best, in the best facilities, and you would win.”
“We have to trust our people, our facilities, our technicians, Newey, and that is perhaps the greatest assurance we have. We don’t have anything reliable, but we do have the best people building the car. So that has to help, yes or yes.”
It’s been 20 years since Fernando Alonso became world champion with Renault, and since then he has been involved in a multitude of winning projects that have come to nothing, that have been a disaster, and that even led him to leave the Grand Prix for two years. He knows that he now has many options to reach the top again, but he also knows that it won’t be easy and that there is still a lot of work to be done and a lot of pushing to make it happen. Aston Martin has invested and is on the right track to achieve success, but the right track is full of complications and the team will have to be able to overcome them if it wants to achieve its goal from 2026 onwards: to reach the pinnacle of motorsport.