What Alonso wants Aston to deliver for critical 2024 F1 resurgence

“At the beginning of the year, I was voted for nine or 10 points. And now I am four or five. But I am at the same level.” 

Given he said this a week on from getting his lowest race rating score from the 2023 Formula 1 season so far in an off-colour Singapore Grand Prix, we can tell Fernando Alonso reads our regular driver ratings feature. Or that he checks his own mark at any rate…  

But Alonso’s slightly sassy assertion after qualifying his Aston Martin AMR23 10th at the Suzuka race – the fourth time in seven events he’d started on the fifth row – provides a handily spot-on metaphor for his first season in green.  

Yes, when it was clear during the early rounds that Aston was Red Bull’s closest challenger as Ferrari and Mercedes again erred in their respective car designs and McLaren was still fighting to escape Q1 with the initially sub-par MCL60, Alonso was scooping up plaudits. His run of six podiums during the opening eight events, while occasionally coaching team-mate Lance Stroll combined to highlight the imbalance of Aston’s new line-up.  

Alonso was mighty – particularly in running Max Verstappen to within just 0.1s of the critical Monaco pole and edge out the equally rapid Charles Leclerc. Only Aston fluffing its lines over pitstop strategy as the late-race rain arrived in the principality let him down – the team acknowledging afterwards had it only pitted once Alonso would’ve jumped the dominant leader.  

Again, Alonso was superb at Zandvoort – scooping his most recent rostrum result with a battling drive that featured assuredness in the mixed conditions while even a fellow world champion slipped off the road. But that drive in the Netherlands was rather unexpected – Alonso hadn’t visited the podium since he edged out Lewis Hamilton behind Verstappen in Canada. Aston’s once so promising season had simmered off the boil.  

As F1 embarks on its second Qatar GP – the scene of the first podium of Alonso’s comeback in the championship in 2021 – the story of Alonso and Aston in 2023 has reached a point familiar from his earlier career exploits.  

Alonso has featured in the podium positions just once since July's Austrian GP and regularly voiced his discontent over the radio in recent events

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

That “this is a lovely car to drive” radio call from the Bahrain opener is but a distant memory. Now, F1 observers more readily recall Alonso declaring the AMR23 “undrivable” in Singapore, plus lamenting he’d been thrown “to the lions” in pitting early in the Suzuka tyre management strategy games.  

Alonso brushed the latter off after the race at Suzuka, saying “it's the same classic theme, the classic FOM radio – completely out of context”. Indeed, while this could simplistically be described as a crack in Alonso’s relationship with his new team, the reality is their honeymoon period had been over for quite a while. In fact, ever since that Monaco near-miss.  

Other than Alonso’s Zandvoort heroics, Aston’s form and results had been trending downwards since the season’s opening third had concluded. And there are several factors at play in explaining this. 

"Even the new factory is just aiming to match this kind of development that other people can do during a season" Fernando Alonso

The first is something Alonso himself acknowledged at Suzuka – that “it was more or less expected that Ferrari, Mercedes – eventually they will match our pace and potentially go ahead”.  

“Mercedes took not too long to be in that position, Ferrari took a little bit longer,” he added. “And McLaren as well, now they are very strong. So, we have to accept that, that we need to raise our level as well. And the rate of development has to be a little bit faster next year.” 

It’s clear that the battle behind Red Bull got very complicated once Mercedes and Ferrari finally decided to start treading down the downwash sidepod route Red Bull had pioneered. Aston made that call in early 2022 and reaped the rewards a year later. Then, with McLaren’s various upgrades vaulting it up the order, Red Bull’s rivals have contrived to take points off each other only, their respective chances limited on differing track types and race circumstances favouring (or not) each design. 

But Aston was not among the lead fight on the one real occasion where Red Bull left the door ajar for the rest – in fact only having one car in the Singapore race as Stroll had wrecked his in qualifying there.  

Aston has been overhauled in the development race this season

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

Its development path hadn’t matched the in-season gains made by others – particularly McLaren – while Ferrari seems to have gotten on top of its tyre management weakness at last. It was then revealed after the Singapore event that Alonso’s pace had been stymied by sustaining a damaged suspension fairing in the early stages. 

“This is a very new team,” the Spaniard says of Aston’s upgrade plan in 2023, where it has opened the first of three massive infrastructure facilities at its redeveloped Silverstone base – the main building of its expanding new ‘campus’. 

“And this is a new position for us. Even the new factory is just aiming to match this kind of development that other people can do during a season. So, it's not that we accept this and we are ok with the situation. We just know that this is a learning season on many fronts.” 

That’s classic Alonso messaging – bolstering his team while concurrently making it clear where he expects it to improve in the future. Even during 2023’s early rounds, his comments established his belief that such glittering success was just a chapter in a longer quest for much bigger things. Alonso’s radio message telling Stroll “not to worry” about an intra-team attack in Spain revealed more than anything that he never really saw himself as a true 2023 title contender. That event also featured the first dip from the brilliant form Alonso had displayed at the start of 2023, with his floor-damaging Q1 off. 

Just before the summer break, Aston team principal Mike Krack said that “in one or two situations we have done not the right choice” – concerning design development choices in the period just as Alonso’s podium run came to an end. His Montreal result actually covered these errors up, as that track’s low downforce nature meant there was less impact from the recently introduced floor and sidepod changes on the AMR23.  

Aston has maintained that this season’s big rules saga – concerning flexi-wings and flexi-floors, covered by FIA technical directives to reduce these apparently being deployed at various teams – has not had any impact on its car design.  

Alonso said in Singapore that “we didn't have to adapt anything” on this front, yet reporting on the whole flexi-bodywork story states that Aston’s rivals were aware the FIA had informally informed the team, and others, that it would be cracking down on such practices from around the time of the Baku race. There was then considerable interest in changes made to Aston’s front wing design, plus its subsequent drop down the pecking order. At no point was the team accused of doing anything illegal with the AMR23.  

Aston Martin hasn't been accused of wrong-doing but the clampdown on flexi-wings has coincided with a dip in performance from the team

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

But the flexi-wing saga ties in with another of Alonso’s points on Aston’s recent form – one that he was vocally annoyed about in Japan. This is that flexing bodywork can potentially help a team shed drag on the straights, which is something Aston has been concerned about all year.  

When he made his “lions” remark, Alonso was agitated at being unable to pass Esteban Ocon’s Alpine. And he continued to be annoyed post-race, saying the context for his FOM-radio-broadcast gripe was that “I'm not sure exactly what other drivers say when they are behind a car that is slower and on the straight they are pulling away even when you open the DRS”. 

Whatever the cause or solution to Aston’s drag problem, Alonso will want it fixed for 2024. But while he is right to highlight he was previously receiving high marks from those humble scribes tasked with ranking supposedly the best 20 drivers in the world from week to week, he might also reflect that the reason he has been scored lower of late is because mistakes have crept in. This is relevant as much as Alonso might refuse to acknowledge errors at one race, having actually done the reverse at another. 

In securing what results he has so far in 2023, along with a management implosion at his former team, Alonso has fully justified his decision to abandon Alpine

Fresh off the Zandvoort podium, Alonso said he’d “felt that I was at my best and have been giving 100% of what I felt and my abilities in a racing car, but maybe in Spa I was not at that level, or in Austria”.  

When Autosport asked him to clarify what had gone wrong with his unexpectedly quiet efforts at the Red Bull Ring (where the virtual safety car undid his contra-strategy gamble it should be noted) and his Spa sprint race crash, he replied that “there is no clear explanation”. At one stage he suspected Pirelli strengthening its tyres constructions had been a factor, before Aston rebuffed this. 

“Sometimes you start the weekend and you feel the car is not responding to your inputs, you're not comfortable on the way in to the corners or you feel something that is not connected to the car,” Alonso explained at Monza. “And then you start changing a few things on the set-up and you're just improving one axle and making the other axle worse.  

“You're just living on a fine line, but you are never happy. So, it happened too often, in July, especially [when the Austria and Spa races took place]. It could be down to the car performance, to the package that we were running at that time. There were a couple of different thoughts of our difficulties in that month.” 

Alonso says there's been no clear explanation for some of his quieter outings

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

Also through this whole campaign, Alonso has been enduring something of a compromise on car handling. The Suzuka drag issue stemmed from Aston’s calculation that additional downforce to improve on the tyre degradation front was worth its straightline speed trade off, as Aston rather languished in the speedtraps.  

Back in Bahrain and through the early rounds, even as he roared to famous results, Alonso was struggling with regular oversteer spikes that he put down to adjusting to Aston’s power steering design. An alteration in Miami made things better, but he reckoned back at Silverstone that “small tweaks that we can think about for the long term or into next year” would be required to complete his adjustment to the Aston package.

Ultimately, in addition to delivering stunning results in 2023 along with occasional mistakes he will only occasionally acknowledge Alonso has always been right all along. This is a journey for the Aston squad, which is also treading rather unfamiliar ground in its battle to be consistently fighting for F1’s leading spots. Not even in its Jordan heyday was it really a regular contender.  

In securing what results he has so far in 2023, along with a management implosion at his former team, Alonso has fully justified his decision to abandon Alpine.  

Aston has pledged to keep new parts trickling onto the AMR23 across the season run-in to boost the potential of its follow up design coming in 2024. That is the key for Alonso’s immediate F1 future. If he sees progress, he’ll big it up. If he does not, expect more team radio angst from F1’s most-calculating in-cockpit operator.

Alonso will expect Aston Martin to rediscover its early-season podium-winning form with its 2024 car

Photo by: Patrick Vinet / Motorsport Images