Why future engine rules proved key in deciding Alonso’s F1 future

Next year will be the 20th anniversary of Fernando Alonso winning his first world championship. A year later he added a second to his trophy cabinet. But, barring a couple of near misses, he’s been in the wrong car at the wrong time ever since and all the signs are that Aston Martin isn’t going to give him a car worthy of winning a third world title in the near future, even if owner Lawrence Stroll succeeds in his bid to hire legendary design guru Adrian Newey.

Soon to turn 43, Alonso has shown increasing impatience for a top-drawer drive. A smattering of podiums at the beginning of last season got his juices flowing before car development progress stalled, to his immense frustration. Yet he’s voted for more of the same: despite options elsewhere, the ink is now dry on a fresh “multi-year” contract that will keep him in British Racing Green until 2026.

But how real were those other options? Mercedes, of course, had (and still has) a 2025 vacancy alongside George Russell, since Lewis Hamilton is displacing Carlos Sainz at Ferrari. At Red Bull, Sergio Perez is out of contract at the end of 2024 and Max Verstappen’s future there is the subject of much speculation, owing to the political machinations playing out in the energy drinks company’s boardroom.

For his part, Alonso has been publicly chafing about Aston Martin’s here-and-now, telling Sky Sports F1 that despite having “one of my best weekends ever” in Japan, “it’s going to be completely anonymous, everyone will forget by tomorrow this weekend that we had”. In other words, finishing in the middle of the top 10, 44 seconds down on the leader, is every bit as painful as trying to conjure a finish from the back of the grid in a slow McLaren with a self-destructing Honda engine – his millstone for three unproductive seasons in the 2010s.

And yet, within days of making that world-weary utterance, he was signing on for more. Despite a claim in the German magazine
Auto Motor und Sport that Aston Martin used Sainz’s availability to force Alonso to stay, this story is believed to be a conjectural dot-joining exercise.

Alonso has been unimpressed by Aston Martin's lack of progress hindering what he feels are some of his best performances, but that wasn't enough to prevent him renewing terms

Photo by: Mark Sutton

Mercedes is understood to favour its young protégé Andrea Kimi Antonelli as the candidate (as does Hamilton), and indeed has brought forward the start of his F1 testing programme. Red Bull team principal Christian Horner has publicly backed Perez’s prospects of staying on, so long as he keeps doing what he’s doing – knowing his place and scoring decent points in Verstappen’s wake. The Dutchman quitting is an increasingly unlikely outcome of the present political drama.

More pressingly for Alonso, it’s an open secret in F1 that many teams are looking to the 2026 regs as a saviour, having capitulated in spirit to continued Red Bull dominance until then – despite Red Bull’s assertions that it’s running out of development runway. Regardless of the concerns about the present shape of those new rules, Aston Martin will have a Honda engine then, while Red Bull will field a Ford-badged powertrain of its own creation.

The only question for Alonso was whether he could commit the energy to staying in F1 through 2025, and another potentially frustrating season of nearly-but-not-quite

Word has been leaking from inside Red Bull that its powertrain project has encountered numerous problems. Horner’s pronouncements have been evasive. He says it’s “hitting the targets”, but also that “we’re on a steep learning curve, but we’re on that curve and where we would expect to be on that curve at this point”.

Whatever conversations Alonso was having with Red Bull, for a 42-year-old abstract geometries do not a convincing argument make. The only question for Alonso was whether he could commit the energy to staying in F1 through 2025, and another potentially frustrating season of nearly-but-not-quite before the opportunity afforded by 2026. With a calendar of 24 races, F1 demands full commitment more than ever.

He’s now provided the answer to that question. As team principal Mike Krack says, “Either you are 100% in it or not. When you see how he’s working [in the garage], how he’s interacting,
you see that there is only 100% for him.”

Krack has no doubts about Alonso's commitment to the cause

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

The new power generation

Teams currently pondering how to communicate
to the world that they’ve given up trying to compete under the current formula are desperate for the 2026 regulations to reset the running
order. But the mood music from the various stakeholders regarding the work in progress
has been anything but harmonious.

At the heart of the matter is the agreed 50/50 ratio of internal combustion to battery power.
The electrical side of the equation doesn’t yet
have the charging or storage capacity to support the level of performance F1 expects, partly because the manufacturers agreed to drop the costly and problematic MGU-H, but also because a proposal
for an energy-recovery facility on the front axle
was also dropped.

Active aerodynamics – think front-and-rear
DRS with bells on – is the proposed sticking-plaster solution for this, but alarming stories have emanated from teams who have been working with the FIA
and F1 to simulate its effects. There was talk of drivers having to downshift on straights or lift-and-coast early; more recently word emerged of cars spinning in a straight line.

Although it transpired that the spins resulted from evaluating one team’s proposal to save weight and complexity by only having active aero at the rear, this was another demonstration of how change can have unintended consequences – even with the simulation power now available to the rulemakers. It’s likely that yet another sticking-plaster solution will be imposed in the form of a strict prescription of how energy is to be deployed.

At the moment, one of the bromides being pitched in support of the “keep calm and carry on” argument is that improved battery technology will dispel the problem. After all, Formula E progressed from needing mid-race car-swaps (complete with incongruous dance music, in a doomed attempt to engage a younger and more hip demographic) to single-car races with vastly improved performance thanks to almost double the energy density.

The (wishful) thinking is that greater competition between manufacturers will fast-track development in F1. Perhaps it will, but without a clear and rigorous plan, this is just kicking the can down the road.

Work on the new regulations hasn't been entirely straightforward

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images