Formula 1 is currently gearing up for the 2024 Mexico City Grand Prix. Or, put another way, the ‘Fernando Alonso 400’.
The double world champion has held F1’s record for the most GP starts since he overtook Kimi Raikkonen back in 2022. In reaching 400, he’s the first human being to reach such a milestone.
“Not good for your back, for your neck, for your spine!” he half-jokingly replies when I ask him about the physical toll of that uncharted territory.
Classic Alonso. Who, on discussing his upcoming race start achievement in the Austin paddock last week, insists he would “would love to race half of the 400 and win one more championship or win more races”.
“Those are the important statistics that you want to achieve,” he adds.
Alonso’s drive for further F1 success is well known. But, as we’ll go on to see, there’s something far deeper and more human at play too. First, however, more stats. Because in four centuries of GP starts, plenty accrue.
Since he made his debut at the 2001 Australian GP, 36% of world championship F1 weekends have featured Alonso plying his trade – as per data released by his Aston Martin squad this week, with assistance from Autosport’s Forix guru, Joao Paulo Cunha.
Alonso has completed more than 72,750 laps in F1 weekend action and test sessions – including 21,578 race laps. He’s done 735 F1 pitstops. His record against his F1 team-mates stands at 292:107 in qualifying and, with 20 double DNFs for the teams he’s raced for since starting out with Minardi, 262:117 in GP races.
His F1 sabbatical yielded two Le Mans 24 Hours wins – the last of which, in 2019, is his most recent race victory in any category – a World Endurance Championship crown and a 24 Hours of Daytona win.
There is, however, a certain stat that needs examining here. How, thanks to his long career, which included racing in an era where such things were more common, several DNS stats appear on his record.
Forix therefore has Alonso officially reaching 400 GP starts at 2024’s Qatar round next month, but he’s celebrating the milestone this weekend as he wants to count the three events where he turned up and put the work in, only to be thwarted. In the case of the 2017 Russian GP, this happened on the formation lap in his McLaren.
“[Reaching 400 races] shows my love for the sport and the discipline of trying to perform at a very high level for 20-plus years,” Alonso explains.
“Hopefully I can celebrate a good weekend in Mexico. [I’m] not cheering for the next 400, because it will never happen, but at least 40 or 50 more with the next two years [at Aston] coming.”
He outlines how “it's not a problem of keeping up with the youngsters in terms of physical conditions” and that it’s “more mentally – travelling, events – and [other] pressure that is probably the thing that hits you harder and probably stops you racing at one point”. But amongst this there’s also something rather revealing. And very interesting.
“It's that hope that next year is going to be your year,” he says of why he’s heading into his 22nd and 23rd seasons in F1, given his latest contract signed back in April. “That it keeps you alive and it keeps you motivated.”
After 21 F1 seasons so far across three distinct stints – where he took his world titles in two, fought relentlessly for another in three others – these words disclose the disappointment Alonso felt at the times he knew, almost immediately, that that third crown wasn’t happening in a particular campaign.
We know this from the words of his longtime friend and colleague, Pedro de la Rosa, who discussed Alonso’s achievements in an exclusive interview with Autosport during the US GP last weekend.
“He always says to me, ‘the day I'm most nervous, the whole season, is the day of the shakedown’,” explains the 104-time F1 race starter, who first met Alonso when his fellow Spaniard first raced for McLaren in 2007, when de la Rosa was the team’s test driver.
“He says, ‘Because the day of the shakedown, I know what type of season is ahead of me’. He's just phenomenal in feeling the car straightaway after two laps.”
The biggest change de la Rosa – these days an Aston team ambassador – says he has spotted in Alonso since 2007 is how “he has improved his English massively”.
“He has no language barrier anymore,” de la Rosa adds. “His accent is very bad, like mine – very Spanish. But actually his vocabulary is incredibly extensive. He's not shy to use the English language in front of as many people as possible.
“And he has understood, from what I've seen, the importance of being a leader. The leader has to have the quality of saying the things that other people can only think about. And that's where Fernando has realised that to become the true leader, he has had to improve on that area.
“Possibly in an unconscious way, just by experience. But he has become an extremely strong leader, always with the correct message to the people. Because to win in Formula 1, you need 800 people pushing every day, 24 hours a day. And I think that's where Fernando is extremely good now, very complete.
“He knows how to send a message across to all these people in English. His Italian is phenomenal as well and if he has to do it in Italian as well, he does it. But the basic difference from the Fernando I first met to the 2.0 Fernando – the latest Fernando – that from the one I have met in 2007, he has become a very complete leader.”
Much is made of Alonso’s self-aggrandisement. How, for example, when asked to pick the best drive of his first campaign with Aston in 2023, which bore eight podiums and a lost victory shot in Monaco, instead he picked his Monza race that year, where he finished ninth.
This was, Alonso said, because it was “one of those weekends where it seems that the performance from the car and myself – they were in a different dimension.”
But, from de la Rosa’s explanation, we can understand just how deliberately Alonso makes every point.
“Some people say he's a negative driver,” de la Rosa adds. “He's not negative. He's critical. It's different.
“Fernando is not a negative person. When the shit hits the fan, he's the most positive person with inner strength you would ever see. But it's the fact – that he's very critical because he's always thinking how he can be faster.
“His only main worry in motor racing is: ‘Is my car quick enough?’
This “passion”, as de la Rosa also puts it, explains much about why Alonso is still going in F1 after so long.
Why he spends his off-seasons taking part in 24-hour go-kart races – acting, per de la Rosa, as the “team manager” with “his Excel sheet, putting in all the lap times and just making sure that we do the best possible strategy”.
His relentlessness can, however, be harder to understand at times. Take his spat with RB rookie Liam Lawson at Austin last weekend.
Lawson claimed Alonso threatened to “screw me” after they clashed in the Austin sprint event – with the pair snapped jawing at each other in parc ferme post-race. The main takeaway from the incident was how, overall, Lawson stood his ground – having forcefully had Alonso off the road in footage not aired on the main broadcast, which explains all the fury.
But Alonso then muscled his way by Lawson exiting the pits in GP qualifying later that day, which the New Zealander saw as him making good on his earlier word. Alonso said, amongst other things, afterwards of the incident: “Everyone on track is behaving as he wants and for me, today was unnecessary.
The incident highlights the marmite nature of Alonso’s character, which seasoned F1 fans will understand well. Some will never get why his drive leads him to act and speak in such ways. Others see the fire and admire. Many more focus solely on just the stunning racecraft and adaptability of an F1 legend, still producing highlights.
Yet that “hope” comment seemed to divulge something much deeper – around Alonso’s long-held and obvious desire to right the wrongs of those missing titles that inspire him seemingly ever onwards.
And perhaps it explains exactly why he's still going, why he's still fighting so hard and being ‘Fernando Alonso’.
In F1’s modern day uber-partisan, hot-take culture, many will disagree. But it’s a theory surely far more human – and therefore more interesting – that speaks to everyone’s inner ambitions and fears for their own lives.
Especially when they’ve found, as Alonso has at motorsport’s top level, and made a success of something they utterly love. An emotion, after all, that can lead to unpredictable places.
“His natural habitat is inside the cockpit,” says de la Rosa. “That's where he feels strong, and I think the fact that he feels so strong driving, he doesn't want to do any other things.
“Because sometimes I ask him, ‘why wouldn't you do another sport or another job or anything? You're still very young. And he said, ‘but I won't be as good as what I do right now’.
“That summarises his way of thinking very much. He knows he has an advantage. He likes to exploit it. And he enjoys being the best. Of feeling the best. Because it doesn't mean he has to win every race. But he has to feel that he's the best.”
No wonder Alonso’s ride is still ongoing. One of F1’s best characters, who seems to never want it to end.
