Why would Aston Martin invest in a 41-year-old driver who has not taken a race victory in almost ten years and whose last world championship came before Lewis Hamilton made his grand prix debut?
But with Fernando Alonso continuing to race such a high level in Formula 1, the right question to ask would be ‘why not?’.
Alonso’s reputation as one of the elite drivers in the field has been influenced as much by Alonso himself and his army of adoring fans as it has his genuine prowess on the track. But looking at Alonso’s 2022 results on paper, it might be difficult to tell why he deserves such a high ranking – especially so far above his team mate. However, Alonso’s second and final year as an Alpine driver was one where the regular laments over misfortunes that has become such a trademark of his was fairly justified.
It was not the strongest opening to the season for Alonso. Despite heading into Bahrain benefiting from Alpine’s first set of upgrades before his team mate did, he could not match Ocon’s pace in the race and was fortunate that Red Bull’s retirements enabled him to take any points at all.
In Jeddah, Ocon out-qualified him by less than a tenth and then proceeded to fight so hard to keep Alonso behind him in the early laps of the race it was as if the pair were fighting for the championship. After eventually clearing his team mate, Alonso was struck by his first car failure of the season when his Alpine overheated, forcing him into retirement.
In Melbourne, Alonso was just plain fast. In the top five of every session from second practice onwards, he breezed into Q3 before setting a purple middle sector on his first flying lap of the final phase. Then, his hydraulics failed him under braking for turn 11, ending his session in the gravel trap and leaving him tenth on the grid. In the race, his ambitious strategy on the hard tyre was heavily compromised early on, a Safety Car scuppered his chances of a recovery and he was forced to pit a second time, dropping him to 17th.
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Alonso was comfortably quicker than Ocon across Imola but dropped from fifth on the sprint race grid to ninth for the grand prix. When the grand prix began he was hit by Mick Schumacher at the first chicane, wounding his car so much that Alpine called him in to retire.
But after three weekends of misfortune, he was entirely to blame for missing the points in Miami. After missing Q3 he gained four places off the line, bumping into Hamilton along the way. After getting stuck behind Pierre Gasly for over 20 laps, Alonso lost patience and made a careless lunge at turn one, hitting the AlphaTauri and earning a five-second penalty. Then late in the race after the Safety Car restart, Alonso cut the chicane at the back of the circuit twice in a not-so-subtle bid to stay out of DRS range of the cars chasing. He was investigated and penalised for one of those incidents, demoting him out of the points after the race.
At home in Barcelona, Alonso suffered from being the first driver to be hit with a power unit grid penalty in the season – just six rounds into a 22-race season. Despite starting from the back of the grid, he did a commendable job in the race to rise up into the points in ninth, despite a small delay on his final pit stop. In Monaco, Alonso crashed out of Q3 but he almost got away without anyone noticing due as all eyes were on the melee further down the road. In the race, he again demonstrated his disregard for convention by deliberately backing off after the restart to effectively hold up half of the field at will. After finishing as ‘best of the rest’ in seventh, he later claimed to be trying to help create a buffer for his team mate to negate a penalty, which proved unsuccessful if so.
Alonso’s on-track eccentricity surfaced again in Baku, when he made a suspicious mistake in qualifying following a red flag that just happened to ensure the cars behind him had to back off under yellow flags. He finished seventh in the race, leading the two McLarens and his team mate home.
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When F1 rolled into Montreal, Alonso rolled back the clock by storming onto the front row of the grid with a brilliant qualifying effort in the wet in which he was second in all three phases. It was inevitable that he would be passed by the faster Ferrari of Carlos Sainz Jnr in the race, but Alonso was cursing his bad luck when he started to experience an ERS failure 20 laps into the race. Despite losing straight-line speed, he fought hard to keep himself in contention for points – perhaps too hard, as his obvious weaving on the back straight on the final lap to keep Valtteri Bottas behind cost him two places after the chequered flag. Again, he came away with fewer points than Ocon despite having driven better across the weekend.
In another wet qualifying session at Silverstone, Alonso was again several rows ahead of Ocon on the grid. In the race, he took advantage of the late Safety Car to jump ahead of Norris and then held him off in the final laps to claim ‘best of the rest’ honours in fifth. But there was yet more frustration in Austria when an electronics failure in prior to the sprint race left him rooted to the back row of the grid for the grand prix. Despite this, he fought back up the field, overcame an extra pit stop due to a loose wheel and ended up taking the final point by passing Bottas on the final lap to salvage some reward from an aggravating weekend.
When things outside of his control were not falling apart, Alonso was consistently beating Ocon. But his team mate was not offering him any concessions out on the track, leading to a second major flare-up of the season between them on the opening lap in Hungary. Alonso fumed that he’d never been treated by a team mate on track like he had by Ocon, but got revenge by promptly announcing he would leave the team at the end of the season to race for Aston Martin in 2023.
Alonso had rare good luck in Spa, surviving contact with Hamilton on the opening lap and inheriting fifth after Ferrari botched their late fastest lap attempt. He was solidly best of the rest in Zandvoort to take sixth, but then the car troubles began to strike again. He retired with a water pump failure in Monza and another power unit problem forced him out of the Singapore Grand Prix while running in sixth.
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His performance at the Circuit of the Americas was one of his best drives of the championship. Without the updated floor offered to his team mate and taking yet another power unit grid penalty, Alonso comfortably reached Q3 over Ocon to start 14th and was as high as seventh before the Safety Car was deployed. At the restart, he made the mistake of not leaving ‘Stroll space’ while in his future team mate’s slipstream and was sent bouncing into the air and into the wall. Despite the scare, Alonso managed to pit for repairs and recovered all the way to seventh by the flag, with his right-hand wing mirror flapping loose and eventually dropping off later in the race. (For a while it seemed that detail would cost him the result, though he ultimately avoided a penalty.)
In Mexico, he suffered his penultimate retirement of the season within a handful of laps from the finish. Then in Interlagos, his on-track rivalry with Ocon reached its boiling point with the pair clashing twice on the opening lap of the sprint race. While Alonso could have been aggrieved by the lack of space he was offered exiting Descida do Lago, running into Ocon on the pit straight was his fault. After a stern telling-off from his soon-to-be former team, Alonso rose from 18th on the grid to take a strong fifth place and 10 vital points in Alpine’s battle with McLaren in the constructors’ championship.
It was almost fitting that Alonso’s final race at Alpine in Abu Dhabi would end with a failure with his car – the fifth time he had been forced out of a race early through no fault of his own. Added to all the other problems he had faced through the season outside of race day, he could be forgiven for being keener than most to put 2022 behind him and look forward to yet another new beginning at Aston Martin.
While his final placing in the standings did not show it, Alonso had been one of the outstanding drivers of the season. Aston Martin may have lost a four-time world champion whom they dearly admired from their team, but based on Alonso’s showings through this last season, they must have a good feeling about who they will replace him with next season.
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