Fernando Alonso in a winning F1 car would be a sensational story — MPH

F1

Fernando Alonso's name was once again near the top of an F1 timesheet during Friday testing. Mark Hughes is hoping that he'll still be there when racing starts

Fernando-Alonso-smiling-at-2023-F1-testing-in-Bahrain

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Mark Hughes

As you read this, the second day of pre-season testing will be underway in Bahrain and doubtless new headlines will be created as the anticipation for the new F1 season ramps up. But the sensation of the first day was definitely that of Fernando Alonso and Aston Martin, second-fastest on the timesheets just a few hundredths slower than Max Verstappen’s Red Bull.

Sure, we need to take that with a pinch of salt, as always with pre-season test times. But the jungle drums were already very active about the Aston Martin AMR23 before any car had turned a wheel. Team personnel talk to each other, wind tunnel numbers get quoted and sometimes these are nothing more than hot air. But sometimes, like pre-season 2009 with the Brawn, they are real. A senior team member of a top team heard the claimed Aston numbers a couple of weeks ago. “If they are real,” he said, “that car is going to be very, very quick.”

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Alonso set the second-fastest time on. Friday as the day turned to night

Dan Istitene/F1 via Getty Images

Lo and behold Fernando Alonso delivers a very big lap on the first day of testing. There is a caveat here in addition to the usual ones about fuel loads and run programmes and how they vary and how no team knows exactly what the others teams are running. Which is that Alonso set the time in the cool of the evening when the track was at its fastest at a time when Verstappen, Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton were all doing higher-fuelled long runs. They’d set their best times in the heat of the day when the track was at least 15C hotter and less grippy.

But what if? What if it’s all true? That Dan Fallows, fresh from Red Bull together with ex-Mercedes aerodynamicist Eric Blandin, have created a disruptor car, like the Brawn? One which disturbs the established order.

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In which case: Fernando Alonso. What a sensational story this would be. The guy has never lost his intensity, desire and sheer love of what he’s doing despite a decade in no-hope machinery. When he left for Indy, Le Mans and Dakar it looked like the F1 career was over, but back he came. Still a very great driver but pushing 40 it then seemed he’d be good for some starring cameos but surely the serious career years were behind him. He would never be getting back into a top team, surely. The starring cameos duly happened – recall his front row in wet qualifying at Canada last year in an Alpine which was ok but certainly not a front row car. Alpine mistakenly believed he didn’t have any serious options when it baulked at his request for a further three seasons last year and it was easy to believe he’d switched to Aston for three years as a proud emotional knee-jerk to being slighted.

But has the soon-to-be 42-year-old just put himself in position to resume his winning ways? With just eight more points distributed in a favourable way he’d be a five-time world champion already, rather than a two-time. Statistics often don’t tally with reality in something as machinery-dependent as motor racing and yes Alonso is not blameless in having been in the wilderness for so long. But he remains one of the greatest competitors this sport has ever seen and if he has finally got himself into the right place at the right time, it would be a fabulous story line.

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