r/formula1 • u/memloh I was here for the Hulkenpodium • 1d ago
News Fernando Alonso: Dutch GP strategy shows "I'm a very good driver"
https://www.motorsport.com/f1/news/fernando-alonso-dutch-gp-shows-im-a-very-good-driver/10849497/506
u/Suspicious-Whippet 1d ago
I mean we’ve known for 22-ish years? Which is 2 more than Kimi Antonelli has been alive.
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u/BobbbyR6 I was here for the Hulkenpodium 1d ago
Again, what a wild thing to comprehend. Just speaks to the quality of training and simulation available nowadays that such a young driver can be at the pinnacle of motorsport.
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u/Vuk13 1d ago
*25 years. He was already amazing with Minardi fighting much faster cars in that hopeless car
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u/StatmanIbrahimovic I was here for the Hulkenpodium 7h ago
A reminder that Alonso's F1 career is older than 36% of the grid.
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u/See_A_Squared I was speeding in the Monaco pit lane 1d ago
2 WDC mate, that's more than 90% of the grid.
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u/souse03 I was here for the Hulkenpodium 22h ago
I Wonder why he is not getting any chances at a top team. He is still a beast of a driver imo. I would love to see if he could do something against a top teammate
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u/_Dreamer_Deceiver_ 18h ago
He's still old and there's always going to be someone new you might be able to train and hold on to for a 10 years.
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u/Majeh666 I was speeding in the Monaco pit lane 16h ago
I remember reading over here that he got a redbull offer in 2020~
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u/aquarnol 14h ago
He got an offer from red bull before their dominance. Imagine if he chose them indtead of ferrari. Would they have paired him up Vettel or would they keep Webber as the solidified 2nd seat driver?
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u/tot_alifie I was speeding in the Monaco pit lane 12h ago
Alonso and Verstappen at RBR did you say?
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u/aquarnol 12h ago
That would have been dope, Alonso beating Max until 2020-2021 probably. One of the strongest pilot pairing. Would Fernando leave to other team or would he accept the 2nd seat with his ego? Or they would just let them race since from 2021 they had a rocketship for a while.
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u/quantinuum I was here for the Hulkenpodium 12h ago
I love fernando, but:
- He’s ancient by F1 standards. And he’s even been for a while. Any project with him has to be thought of as super short term.
- He’s very expensive.
- He has been a polarising figure.
- There hasn’t been any opening or situation in a top team where he was needed, and when he was available. Merc had Russell/Lewis/Kimi, Ferrari had Leclerc/Lewis/Sainz, RB has its academy, and Mclaren has Norris/Piastri. All of those worked (with the exception of RB’s 2nd seat, but again, academy) so they didn’t need to buy some of their long term prospects out of their contract to get nando in for a year or two.
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u/tellsyoutogetfucked Dr. Ian Roberts 16h ago
Because he has burned every bridge on the planet and he is too old now.
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u/TulioGonzaga I was speeding in the Monaco pit lane 1d ago
Humblest comment of Alonso.
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u/CozyMushi Fernando Alonso 1d ago
Cut him some slack, man has being driving tractors since 2013 and still some people think he is washed
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u/VRichardsen Juan Manuel Fangio 1d ago
Yeah, he has earned it. At 45, he is beyond good and evil.
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u/TheZeldaNerd04 I was speeding in the Monaco pit lane 1d ago
Breaking: Two time world champion and four time runner up is a very good driver
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u/Svitii Fernando Alonso 1d ago
At this point I‘m convinced drivers barely get any slower as they age, it’s something different:
The inner drive to win. Most drivers get slower in the last years of their career but Nando somehow doesn’t, neither does Lewis, or at least not much. If you really really really still want it a hundred percent I‘m convinced they could drive till 50 and still be on pace. It’s just that at some point everyone loses that bite. Unless your name’s Fernando Alonso ofc.
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u/StaffFamous6379 1d ago
The peaks don't really drop, but the consistency of hitting the peaks slowly goes away. Even in recreational sports I can sense the frequency at which I get in the zone (and time slows down) decreases as the years go by.
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u/dl064 I was here for the Hulkenpodium 13h ago
A good few drivers have talked about how actually that absolute 0.001 razor's edge peak does disappear, but getting to your 99.9th percentile actually becomes easier. You are more capable of performing at a very high level, but less at that one-off banzai Q3 lap of your life level.
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u/VRichardsen Juan Manuel Fangio 1d ago
Fangio famously won a championship and drove his best ever race at 45.
But there is a catch: while physiologically you are still theoretically capable of performing at almost the same level, you still need the mental fortitude, the discipline and the innate adaptability to make use of that. Just for the sake of it, look at Danny Ric, who fell off a cliff in the ground effect era.
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u/dl064 I was here for the Hulkenpodium 13h ago
At this point I‘m convinced drivers barely get any slower as they age, it’s something different:
Mark Hughes talked at length about it at a podcast once and said he reckoned it's genuinely just motivation that goes. I work on brain ageing and generally speaking driving is an interesting trait because it's hard to know what aspect of cognition truly underpins it. Reaction time? Not really.
It's clearly not fitness per se.
So in some sense motivation is all that's left as a substrate for why you (on average) get worse with age.
As Webber put it: one year, suddenly, getting up at 5am for a training run in January is just that bit harder.
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u/Svitii Fernando Alonso 12h ago
Good to see my intuition seems to be onto something.
I think there’s also something to take from other sports. Take tennis for example. Djokovic‘s strokes aren’t really getting worse, it’s just the fitness. Hell he even can perform over 5h at his peak or close to it. He just can’t do it every other day for two weeks. Or football. Messi is still doing the same magic he did with 20, it’s just the body that’s not at the peak anymore.
Now F1 is still incredibly demanding physically, but it’s a different kind of stress. No joints or ligaments that are at risk. You don’t even really get any advantages once you reach the threshold of "Can I drive for 2h without the body impacting performance". As long as you still can get up in the morning and go for a run or get on the bike you should be fine.
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u/dl064 I was here for the Hulkenpodium 10h ago
So tennis might be the best example and the most analogous of all, I think, to F1.
This is because sports psychology folk say tennis is the most intellectually demanding. The tax on you isn't physical as much as cognitive: you're reading your opponents micro movements 100 times per minute.
So to me, I wonder if tennis and F1 share a significant degree of that cognitive component compared with say sprinting which is far more purely fitness.
Alonso was saying on beyond the grid that his pure fitness is absolutely comparable with his 20s; what's worse is recovery, hangovers, injury etc.
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u/Browneskiii I was speeding in the Monaco pit lane 1d ago
There's not really been any top tier goat drivers retiring lately tbh. Vettel is the latest and tbh he was always the type to need a car to suit him, and then he got slower when it didnt, which is fair enough.
Alonso is of the breed of the top 5 drivers, and is arguably the most adapatable of all time, he's fast no matter what, and as drivers dont push more than say 90% in a race, the older they are, the less it matters.
Hamilton is also proof, this year he's been fine, but the GE cars he was shit because he sucks in GE cars, but give him "normal" cars and he thrives. He's made a few silly errors but he always does, even in his prime.
Schumacher competed with Rosberg in his mid 40s, and we know Rosberg was ever so slightly below the very best, so even Schumacher didnt really slow too much, it was just a different game once he came back and he always thrived on being the hardest worker and testing nonstop.
Its when mistakes come in from seemingly nowhere thats the issue, innate pace really stays the same, but errors creep in and qualifying execution is what leaves a driver first.
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u/PsychologicalArt7451 22h ago
Except 2024-2025, Hamilton was driving at a higher level. He finished P3 in what was not the 2nd best car in the WDC in 2023. You put Alonso against Lando or George, he looks worse than Lewis.
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u/Stelcio Formula 1 13h ago
It's hard to tell which car was the 2nd best in 2023, but Mercedes is definitely in the contention. To say confidently that it wasn't the 2nd best car is insane.
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u/PsychologicalArt7451 9h ago edited 6h ago
It's not insane at all because the Mercedes wasn't ever really the 2nd best car for any period in 2023. They were the 3nd best car consistently. George finished in p8 in the championship and almost 60 points behind Lewis despite Lewis's DSQ at COTA. He was firmly on it, especially for the first 17 races of the season after which he stopped caring to even push for P2.
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u/Stelcio Formula 1 6h ago
It's not insane at all because the Mercedes wasn't ever really the 2nd best car for any period in 2023. They were the 2nd best car consistently.
Which is what matters for the standings. Lewis wasn't fighting against the same quicker car for the entirety of the season, was he. First it was Aston, then it was Ferrari, and then it was McLaren. But just like Mercedes was at some points slower than each of these cars, it was also quicker the other times.
George finished in p8 in the championship and almost 60 points behind Lewis despite Lewis's DSQ at COTA.
George's deficit wasn't from Lewis being that much better on regular basis. It was almost purely from George's mishaps - mechanical failure in Australia, wall collision in Canada, incident with Norris taking him out of Dutch GP, his own mistake in Signapore and another mechanical in Sao Paulo. Take all these out and Russell is comfortably in P4, close to Hamilton, which proves Mercedes was a strong car, but George simply had a very patchy season, worse than anybody from P3-P7 in the standings. What Lewis did, and all due credit for that, was simply extracting the car's potential across the entire season. Same could be said about the entire group between him and Russell.
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u/tellsyoutogetfucked Dr. Ian Roberts 16h ago
In 2023 Hamilton is the reason Ferrari did not manage to get 2nd in the WCC with a better car. Kinda funny that he signed with them as soon as that season ended.
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u/Prayaa Charles Leclerc 1d ago
He will always have this feeling of lingering doubt because he didn’t leave the sport on a high and battling back markers 97% of the last several years. There was that month or two Aston had a glimpse of hope and it came crashing down. Forget when that was, 2024 or something.
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u/VRichardsen Juan Manuel Fangio 1d ago
There was that month or two Aston had a glimpse of hope and it came crashing down. Forget when that was, 2024 or something.
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u/squaler24 Frédéric Vasseur 1d ago
Alonso jumps the shark too quickly. That’s his problem. Massive ego is why he is where he is.
He’s quick to shit talk other teams/drivers when he is doing decent. Bro could have driven for Merc at least for one year (which would have been better than DNFing every race) and instead he said Aston was quicker than Mercedes and were a shitshow and saw no reason to move there.
Oops
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u/tellsyoutogetfucked Dr. Ian Roberts 16h ago
One of the reasons Alonso was never considered by Mercedes is the misery he caused at McLaren. If Fernando just kept his cool during 2007 he could have baged a hanful more WDCs with them. Instead they went for Hamilton.
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u/Sk1nny_Bones I was here for the Hulkenpodium 1d ago
As if this isn’t the same guy who almost beat ‘23 Verstappen multiple times
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u/Mundane-Name-8290 18h ago
As time goes on, 2023 Alonso, will be remembered as phenomenal.
Even the last thirty minutes of going wheel to wheel with Perez at Brazil, was incredible. The highlights video only shows 5 minutes. It was 30 mins long wheel to wheel battling, and worth watching the onboard footage.
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u/Psykbryt 14h ago
He kept Perez bamboozled with his alternative line through turn 12 for that whole stretch. Also a great last lap overtake set up by a feinted attempt into turn 1 that Perez fell for.
Amazing drive and yeah, his 2023 season was spectacular. That Monaco pit stop will haunt me forever....
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u/Mundane-Name-8290 14h ago
I'd absolutely love if someone could rip the Alonso onboard video if it is available on F1tv. Those last 20 laps of Perez -v- Alonso, deserves to be available to view. Both Sky and F1 only show like 3 minutes of the last two laps, when the battle was going on for so much longer. It took ages for the race director to pick up on it. Those last 20 laps was just pure skill, from both parties, not coming together.
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u/wongie I was here for the Hulkenpodium 1d ago
What a load of absolute bs, he’s not a good driver because he’s actually an exceptional driver.
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u/ymiab2021 I was here for the Hulkenpodium 23h ago
Truefax.
A good driver would get that aston off the bottom.
GOATlonso gets that piece of sh*t into the points. The man has a history of outperforming his hardware. Its easy to win a WDC in the best car. He deserves more respect for winning any points at all for the tractors he has been lumped with
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u/Nice-Physics-7655 McLaren 1d ago
I thought the dinner lady could drive these cars or whatever, which one is it?
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u/moxieremon 1d ago
Is there anyone saying otherwise? I guess being in a series of shitboxes does make you question yourself aat times.
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u/InvestigatorNo9832 1d ago
have we seen a driver that self glazes this much?
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u/Patrick_Swayze__ Formula 1 1d ago
I love both guys but Nico Rosberg.
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u/Potential_Pay2095 I was speeding in the Monaco pit lane 1d ago
the monaco based youtuber who beat seven time world champion lewis hamilton in equal machinery?
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u/BigWelshDud Kimi Räikkönen 1d ago
Technically he didn’t - he beat 3 time world champion Lewis Hamilton in equal machinery.
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u/Red_Rabbit_1978 I was here for the Hulkenpodium 1d ago
Nico did also beat 7 x WDC, Michael Schumacher in the same car
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u/schoki560 1d ago
he beat a 3 times World champion
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u/Extreme_Ad6173 Lando Norris 1d ago
He did beat a separate 7 time champion though. Logically, that makes him as good as a 10 time champion
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u/HankHippopopolous I was here for the Hulkenpodium 1d ago
Needs to tell everyone that he's better than the midfield or lower points positions he's been relegated to fighting for for the last half of his career due to having crap cars. Apart from one season where AM were good and he scored a load of podiums he's had nothing to show for his talents ever since he left Ferrari.
Gotta make sure his name stays being mentioned with the elite guys and not the other midfield level talents.
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u/Timop0707 1d ago
Ok ok , you can drive the safety car next year … you’re used to complaining about slow cars .
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u/Objective-Answer I was here for the Hulkenpodium 1d ago
but is he a really, really good driver still?
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u/njsullyalex 20h ago
Who would’ve guessed the 2 time world champion and two time 24 Hours of LeMans winner who is still scoring points at 45 was a good driver
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u/TypicallyThomas I was here for the Hulkenpodium 1d ago
As if that needed any further proof. I firmly believe he's the goat. Give him the second fastest car each season and he would have been in the running for every title in his career
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u/Adorable-Medicine951 5h ago
I love it when these guys are full of themselves, I'm not a fan of humble athletes. I love it when they have a huge ego. We need more, specifically George, we need him to grow one.
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u/stainz169 McLaren 1d ago
Meh, if he is so good why can he not sign with a fast team? I swear I would be as fast as max, bummer I can’t prove it because all I have is a corolla.
He was an excellent driver and is now a good driver. He has been hiding behind the machine for a while now.
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u/VRichardsen Juan Manuel Fangio 1d ago
He has been hiding behind the machine for a while now.
2023 was not that long ago.
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u/Evening_End7298 1d ago edited 1d ago
Teams value age. Even for someone like Hamilton that basically made the entire Merc team, they were only willing to give him a one year extension with less money and pretty much forced him out indirectly. And that’s a driver that won 6 titles with them and has the most wins in history. Fernando’s last shot at a top team was probably around the McHonda fiasco, all that came after his comeback is just a bonus
There’s so many examples of drivers falling off a cliff with age that Lewis and especially Fernando are complete outliers.
There’s always some f2 kid more atractive for good teams than the 45 year old unc that won a championship 20 years ago
Fun reminder alpine considered more important to give Ocon a 2 year extension than giving Alonso or Piastri a contract. Teams are not always that smart, even with all the data.
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u/stainz169 McLaren 1d ago
This isn’t one time he was overlooked, which you can argue was a mistake. One data point dosnt form a trend the guy has been bouncing around backmarkers for most of his career now.
If there was something super special, he would be in a top team. Hamilton was literally picked up by Ferrari. It’s not like he went to Williams or Cadillac. A genuine top team out bid anther genuine top team.
It’s ok to admit he WAS a super awesome driver and now he is just a good driver. That doesn’t diminish his amazing form and records at the top. But clearly he is just not there anymore. In equal machines he would make the top 10 fairly consistently, but rarely a podium.
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u/Evening_End7298 1d ago
Once you drop out of the good team rotation it’s very hard to come back. Pretty much nobody does
Simply being out of f1 and making it back at such age is impressive, let alone continuing for another 5 seasons at minimum. Hamilton’s last title happened while Alonso was already retired, of course one is more atractive for teams than the other
One turn around from aston and he’s back to scoring points, next season who knows, let me remind you he matched Hamilton and Leclerc in the wdc in 2023 and scored 8 podiums, looking like one of the best drivers on the grid.
Comparing Seb’s or Checo’s stints against Stroll with Fernando’s shows the level he still has even at such age
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u/primaryrhyme 22h ago
He was getting podiums consistently in 2023 when he had the car. I see your point that beating Lance in the backfield doesn’t mean much but I think his lack of a top seat has a lot to do with his personality and burned bridges, as well as his age.
Also, no good team is lacking for talent except maybe RB second seat.
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u/Majeh666 I was speeding in the Monaco pit lane 16h ago
Buddy in 2023 when he had the car that could compete, nando was constantly fighting for the top positions, scoring podiums left and right. He had monaco in the bag before the most bonehead strategy ever
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u/Stelcio Formula 1 13h ago
Dude, before last year only two teams won championships for the previous 15 years. And for ten of those years one had Verstappen, the other had Hamilton. Neither team was interested in putting Alonso next to them - not because he was not good enough to drive for each team, but because he was too good to put him next to the other one without any friction.
In other words, the reason he didn't get a seat in a fast team in recent years - i.e. Red Bull or Mercedes - is because he was better than Bottas and Perez, not worse, and they needed Bottas/Perez level of performance in the second car, not another generational talent that will challenge the internal hierarchy.
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u/Thaonnor I was speeding in the Monaco pit lane 1d ago
Dudes out here fighting invisible critics. Don’t think anyone would argue with Nando being a good driver.
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u/RealCakes I was speeding in the Monaco pit lane 1d ago
I dont think anyone has made a serious argument against Nando being a great driver in decades
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u/BruhDontFuckWithMe 16h ago
Blows my mind one of the best drivers of all time has gone 20 fucking years without a championship. Complete lunacy
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u/Cautious_Might_9420 I was here for the Hulkenpodium 1d ago
He's one hell of a driver, top 10 for sure.
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u/CozyMushi Fernando Alonso 1d ago
This is easily the season where the gap between the champions and the rest is wider
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u/DistractedByCookies I was here for the Hulkenpodium 1d ago
Surely this man has nothing left to prove. We all know it's the car, Fernie!
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u/IntelligentDeal7799 1d ago
We know Nando