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Motorsport

Fernando Alonso: ‘10 years ago, I looked crazy criticising Honda…’

Fernando Alonso Honda McLaren Aston Martin Jenson Button Aston (Organization) Aston Martin Racing F1 LAT Images Renault

As Formula 1’s most experienced driver in history, Fernando Alonso has seen it all. Racing for a backmarking minnow at Minardi, championship success and Crashgate controversy at Renault, a deleterious team-mate rivalry at McLaren and unsuccessful title bids at Ferrari.

The veteran’s second stint at McLaren featured a disastrous rekindling of the team’s legendary partnership with Honda, which yielded iconic success with Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The Japanese manufacturer returned to F1 one year into the new-for-2014 engine regulations and struggled with both performance and reliability. Amid an abundance of grid penalties, the McLaren-Honda relationship quickly deteriorated, and both parties went their separate ways at the end of the 2017 season, with the Woking-based outfit opting for a Renault engine supply instead.

After he humiliated Honda on its turf, branding his powertrain a “GP2 engine” on the radio in the 2015 Japanese GP, Alonso certainly wasn’t expected to work with the brand again.

Fernando Alonso, McLaren MP4-30 (Photo by: McLaren)

But the two-time world champion’s winding career path has led him back to Honda, in a butterfly effect of Honda deciding to leave F1 in October 2020, oblivious to the fact it was set for championship glory; Red Bull consequently building its own engine programme alongside Ford; Honda making a tardy U-turn back into F1; and Aston Martin deciding to ditch its Mercedes customer status for a Honda works partnership.

A decade later, history just seems to be repeating itself as the Adrian Newey-designed Aston Martin AMR26 is crippled by a Honda engine whose vibrations damage battery after battery, and even sparked concerns regarding drivers’ health.

Billionaire owner Lawrence Stroll has tremendously invested in the Silverstone-based outfit, attempting to make it a title-winning outfit or, at the very least, a championship challenger. Alonso’s third F1 world title, which he has chased for two decades, is now proving elusive to the Spaniard, who will turn 45 this summer.

So how tough is the current hardship for Alonso? “Less tough than what you think,” he replied in Thursday’s press conference.

Lance Stroll, Aston Martin Racing, Fernando Alonso, Aston Martin Racing (Photo by: Dom Gibbons / LAT Images via Getty Images)

“I mean, not ideal. We all want to win. We are 22 drivers this year. One will win, 21 will be in a difficult and tough mental state, because for me to finish third or fifth or 17th, it really doesn’t matter much.

“I was lucky enough and privileged enough to live different eras in Formula 1 and to have fun driving, and eventually super lucky to have competitive cars for half of my career and achieving more than 100 podiums in the category. So now to finish, as I said, in any other position that is not first, for me it’s the same pain and the same struggle.

“Obviously, we are now in this journey with the team, which is not the ideal start, but it’s the first year of this collaboration between Aston Martin and Honda and we have to go through this moment in time, and I’m ready to help as much as I can.”

Alonso obviously can’t be oblivious to the parallels with the McLaren-Honda era, and with hindsight he is, again, more philosophical than ever.

“I think I can see things now in a different perspective and a different maturity, but I don’t think that 10 years ago things were, again, that dramatic,” he said. “This is Formula 1, a very media-centric sport. When you win a few championships just racing against your team-mate, you are God, and then when you are fighting and having some difficult period, everything is magnified as well.

“For me, the biggest surprise was all these last few years thinking that 10 years ago McLaren, Stoffel [Vandoorne], Jenson [Button], myself — because always people seem to remember only Fernando, but I think Jenson, Stoffel and McLaren, we were saying the same — that project, the power unit, was not mature enough when we started, which everyone seems now to understand.

Fernando Alonso, McLaren and Jenson Button, McLaren (Photo by: McLaren)

“But two or three years ago it seemed that I was crazy, 10 years ago, criticising or something like that. It was, I think, a few frustrations on the radio, which were there, and as a double world champion and a competitive driver, I was not happy with the situation – wow, you know, should I be happy and clapping inside the car about the job?

“So now, I think when everyone sees from the outside that situation and they see the current situation, I think they are a little bit more friendly with us and they understand more the problems. And now what can I do in the team is just work harder, try to help Honda as much as we can, allocating some of the resources that Aston Martin has into the engine, into the power unit, into the vibration problems, into the deployment issues.

“We are one team. As I said, it’s a bumpy start, but I hope it will not last for too long.”

There was no real progress performance-wise on Friday at the Chinese Grand Prix, as Aston Martin attempted to reduce the gap to the midfield. Alonso qualified 0.82s away from the lead Williams, and was 0.99s down on the Q2 cut-off time.

Fernando Alonso, Aston Martin Racing (Photo by: Alastair Staley / LAT Images via Getty Images)

But performance isn’t Aston’s priority yet, especially with the team still expected to limit its mileage as it doesn’t have as many spare batteries as it would wish.

Asked on Thursday what a positive weekend would look like, Alonso replied: “I think obviously when we are able to do laps without any issues, I think they are very important laps because even now here with Esteban [Ocon] and Pierre [Gasly, who were next to him in the press conference], they were not optimised for Australia and apparently it was the same case for everybody, and they are, I don’t know, maybe 10 times ahead of us.

“If they completed 1,000 laps since Barcelona test, we completed maybe 100, so we are nine or 10 times behind. So, if they are still not perfectly optimised, imagine ourselves.

“We are at square one, so we really need the laps, we really need to be able to practice and to find the window on the car and the chassis side. That will obviously be very important for the weekend, and I will be happy if we leave China with a more or less normal free practice, more or less normal quali, accumulating laps and probably attempting the full race on Sunday, if we are allowed.” A thinly veiled reference to the AMR26’s inability to complete the Australian GP due to the aforementioned concerns.