Alonso's burning desire: why age isn't slowing the 42-year-old F1 champion

F1

It's commonly accepted that F1 drivers get slower as age withers their reactions. But Fernando Alonso is proving that wrong. Mark Hughes explains how the Aston Martin driver's competitive fire dwarfs the effect of his 42 years

Fernando Alonso 2023 Sao Paulo Grand Prix

An eighth podium of the 2023 season is proof Alonso's longevity is unmatched

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Mark Hughes

As Fernando Alonso answered questions in the Sao Paulo Grand Prix press conference, having staged that remarkable defence of third place against Sergio Perez’s much faster Red Bull, he was asked how this compared to his defensive drive against Michael Schumacher to win at Imola in 2005. “That was easier,” he replied, “because it was non-DRS. Now with the DRS, it seems a little bit different and you have to play things a little bit differently. And tyre management is also very different than back then, where you could maybe push the tyre all the way.”

Before providing his answer, he turned to the winner of the race, Max Verstappen, and asked how old he had been that day. Max replied five (he was actually seven). Which just underlines the remarkable durability of Alonso as a performer from the very top drawer. It isn’t physical deterioration which slows a driver, not at the relatively young age of 42 anyway. Being quick is not about reactions, but feel. Quick reactions are great, and certainly no hindrance, but they don’t buy you lap time. Michael Schumacher, one of the greatest there’s ever been, had his reactions measured when at his peak at Ferrari. They were pretty awful, “About the same as mine,” as his boss Ross Brawn said. In any start-line measurements in testing, Schumacher’s reactions were always slower than those of Rubens Barrichello. Yet back in 1991 British F3, when Barrichello was losing races to poor starts from pole, his team boss Dick Bennetts took him and his other driver Jordi Gene to Santa Pod drag strip to practice starts – and Barrichello’s reactions were consistently slower than Gene’s. Slower than Gene’s but faster than Michael’s which were about the same as Brawn’s… Being quick in the car isn’t about reacting to what it does, it’s about feeling what it’s about to do. If you only reacted to what it did, you’d crash.

Fernando Alonso defends against Michael Schumacher at the 2005 San Marino Grand Prix

Alonso defends against Schumacher at Imola in 2005

Mark Thompson/Getty Images

Fernando Alonso defends against Sergio Perez in 2023 Sao Paulo Grand Prix

Fernando Alonso got the better of Sergio Perez in Brazil — and some experts still can't believe it...

Florent Gooden/DPPI

So the dimming of reactions as you age means next to nothing. Similarly, the gradual aerobic fitness loss doesn’t have the same impact as it would on a field athlete. These things only seem to begin to impact in the late 40s, if we look at the few case studies of drivers who have competed in top categories that long – Mario Andretti and Emerson Fittipaldi in Indycar, Richard Petty in NASCAR. Forty-one-year-old Nigel Mansell beat peak Schumacher to pole at Adeliade 1994, 0.65s faster than team mate Damon Hill. Forty-four year-old Jack Brabham’s final season in 1970 was one of his very best. The incomparable Fangio was still at his absolute peak when he drove the greatest race of his career to win at the Nurburgring in 1957 on his way to title number 5, aged 45. On the other hand, David Coulthard spoke of how his split-second perception of where gaps would be by the time he arrived seemed to be deteriorating in his final season of F1, aged just 37. But that’s clearly not a universal thing. Some point to Schumacher’s relative lack of performance in his Mercedes comeback years when in his 40s. But in between his first and second careers he’d suffered a severe neck injury, one which severed several crucial neuron pathways and which his doctor explained was in 99% of cases fatal.

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Otherwise, what slows a driver is not usually age, but simply the desire, the wish to keep putting it on the line, to go wheel-to-wheel with fearless and ambitious young chargers, amid the constant grind, the years of flight-hotel-track-flight-hotel-track, media work, sponsor greeting etc. All the while trying to find ways of improving yourself, of helping the team progress.

That desire in Alonso has always marked him out. Yes, he’s super-fast, very smart and has a sixth sense of how to place his car in battle. But he’s never been the absolute fastest over a single lap, never the absolute best wet weather driver. His peaks are quite rounded ones, but are wider than anyone else’s – and he has so many of them. Desire is the outstanding quality, and it’s been there from the start. Let’s go back a couple of years even from that Imola ’05 race he was asked about, to Interlagos 2003, his second year of F1. It was his third race for Renault. Circumstances, his combativeness and the appalling weather had given him a wild ride, but he just kept bouncing back from setbacks and may well have won despite everything had he not encountered Mark Webber’s detached wheel over the brow of the hill at 170mph.

Fernando Alonso climbs out of his wrecked Renault at the 2003 Brazilian Grand Prix

A shaken Alonso climbs from his wrecked Renault at Interlagos in 2003

Orlando Kissner/AFP via Getty Images

Starting 10th, he’d made his way up to sixth when a safety car triggered almost everyone to visit the pits for fresh tyres and a refuel. There’d been a mix up in the garage and Alonso was erroneously fitted with slicks and not the intended intermediates. Which entailed him coming in again the following lap for the correct tyres. He rejoined now 16th but in the following few laps got himself up to fourth, often the fastest man on track in the very variable conditions. He was being held up by Ralf Schumacher’s Williams as they were both caught and passed by Kimi Raikkonen’s McLaren. In the spray he didn’t see yellow flags as he then passed the Williams to set chase for Raikkonen. He was awarded a drive-through penalty for the yellow flag infringement, losing him several places, one of them to the Jordan of eventual winner Giancarlo Fisichella. Returning to the track now ninth, Alonso’s pace was extraordinary and in the space of a few laps he was up to third and catching both Raikkonen and Fisichella fast. He was too far behind to get them by the end but suddenly there was an opportunity: a safety car. He’d pulled out enough of a gap behind there was time to get him into the pits for fresh tyres, so he’d be lined up right behind the two leaders who’d be on old rubber for the restart. This was winnable and he knew it.

Instructed to pit, he was pushing hard on the in-lap (no S/C deltas back then) when he encountered the wheel from Webber’s crashed Jaguar, just before the pit entry, which bounced him violently from one wall to the next. “I had seen the yellow flags and the safety car signal,” he reported the next day, after being kept in hospital overnight for observation, “but when they show the signal there are actually yellow flags all around the track, so I wasn’t expecting a piece of car in the middle of the road.”

It couldn’t happen like that now, for there are procedures in place to guard against it. But on that day 20 years ago the circumstances offered a tantalising glimmer of victory and the desire overrode everything. That desire is more controlled now but has lost none of its intensity.

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