Slow decline means F1 superstar may REGRET big decision (and it's not Lewis Hamilton)

When Fernando Alonso crossed the finish line in last Sunday’s Austrian Grand Prix, he pipped championship leader Max Verstappen’s time by a whisker to secure the fastest lap of the race.

Outdoing the campaign’s leading driver on raw pace and nicking an extra championship point would be cause for celebration in normal circumstances, but on this occasion Alonso will have been left little more than nonplussed behind his visor as he dragged his Aston Martin back to the pits.

That is because Alonso set the benchmark only after stopping for fresh soft tyres at the very end of the race, missed out on the bonus point by finishing a lowly 18th, and endured one of the most meekly disappointing weekends of his career.

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The Spaniard was knocked out of qualifying for both the sprint race and grand prix in Q2, lagged behind team-mate Lance Stroll when the chequered flag fell at the end of both events, and was given a hefty ten-second penalty for a clumsy slide into the side of Guanyu Zhou which pushed the Sauber off the circuit.

This was an uncharacteristically error-strewn, ineffective and downright slow performance from Alonso, compounding a poor run of form which is beginning to stretch across a significant portion of the season.

It was the fourth time in the past five races he has finished outside the points, leaving him marooned in ninth in the drivers’ standings, with more than double the points of RB’s Yuki Tsunoda behind but less than half of Mercedes’ Lewis Hamilton ahead.

Afterwards, a forlorn sounding Alonso made clear that his weekend was doomed from the outset.

“Difficult race,” he sighed. “When you don’t have the pace, you have to try alternative strategies. We tried three stops, then I locked up and touched Zhou and had the penalty. All in all it probably didn’t change the result because we were out of the points [anyway]. But very long race… 71 laps when you are not fast enough…”

And therein lies the issue – Alonso’s Aston Martin team is undergoing a slow decline in speed which has seen them drop from podium contenders at the beginning of 2023 to possible points scorers earlier this year and now lower midfield runners sliding towards backmarker territory.

At this race last year Alonso finished fifth, and the eight podiums he took across the whole of the campaign meant he enjoyed his best season in a decade. A first grand prix win since 2013 seemed tantalisingly close.

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But that elusive victory never came to pass and now seems further away than it has ever been.

The slump which Aston Martin – who have invested heavily in their Silverstone headquarters and poached technical personnel from rivals including Red Bull since the team was taken over by Stroll’s billionaire father Lawrence – have fallen into was perhaps most evidently underlined when Alonso has a run-in with his former team Alpine.

On Lap 36 in Spielberg Alonso could only muster a morose “wow” over team radio as Esteban Ocon and Pierre Gasly – team-mates at the French squad which Alonso left behind in the hopes of finding greater performance at Aston Martin – combined to first overtake him and then block him off from re-challenging for position.

Given Alpine’s own wretched run over the past couple of seasons and the uptick in Aston Martin’s package upon his initial arrival, making the switch seemed to have been Alonso’s first good career choice in years. He had, after all, made a hash of previous transfers by joining Renault, Ferrari and McLaren when each team was falling back onwards from in 2008, 2010 and 2015 respectively.

A little over two months ago Alonso was still so convinced by the Aston Martin project that he renewed his contract for a further two years, taking him into F1’s new era of technical regulations form 2026 onwards, when the team’s cars will be powered by Honda power units.

It is since the announcement of that renewal, though, that things have turned sour. Not only is the car dropping further and further off the pace, but Alonso’s driving has become strangely subdued and his usually passionate and forthright personality seems somewhat tempered.

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The 42-year-old has demonstrated on more than enough occasions since his full-time return to F1 that his pace and racecraft remain as sharp as they ever were. The idea that this is some sort of personal wane on his part and that the car remains competitive is therefore unrealistic.

But there is a fair chance that, with the clock ticking on his career, Alonso may well already be wondering if his decision to stick around at Aston Martin will ultimately mean he can compete at the front of the field again.

In all likelihood the seats at Mercedes and Red Bull which at one point seemed a possibility were always very unlikely to be offered to him, and at the point he made his decision to renew with Aston Martin he had finished in the points at every race.

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A few race weekends can very easily feel like a long time in Formula 1, though, and suddenly the outlook for the future appears significantly less prosperous than it did earlier on in the campaign.

Much speculation has surrounded Hamilton’s supposed unhappy divorce with Mercedes, with the seven-time world champion being consistently outperformed by team-mate George Russell ahead of his upcoming move to Ferrari at the end of 2024. But Hamilton is still scoring decent points and knows he is moving to the most illustrious team in the sport’s history in a matter of months.

Perhaps then Alonso is the F1 superstar whose performances and persona seem most stunted by uncertainty at present.

Maybe this is all just one solid upgrade package away from becoming just a blip at a tough point of the year both team and driver, but right now one of F1’s most impressive champions is drifting towards also-ran territory again, and the power to set things right sits in the hands of his team.

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