Lando Norris is now a Formula 1 race winner, but he is not the only driver who had to wait a long time for their first big hit. F1 history is filled with stories of drivers who had to work really hard for their long awaited first victory. In this episode: Jean Alesi, one of F1’s most unlucky drivers.
The history of Formula 1 is riddled with stories of drivers who had the skills, but never quite got the right machinery to make them successful. Jean Alesi is definitely one of those. He got his start in F1 in possibly the worst circumstances imaginable. It was halfway through the 1989 season, and Alesi was competing in the Formula 3000 championship, the equivalent of what these days is Formula 2. The Tyrrell F1 team meanwhile had gotten into a dispute with their driver Michele Alboreto, who promptly left the team in the middle of the raceweekend for the French Grand Prix. That meant Tyrrell had to draft in a replacement, and the story goes that Eddie Jordan - owner of the F3000 team that Alesi was driving for - not only pushed Alesi forward, but actually made a bet with team owner Ken Tyrrell that Alesi would do better than the other driver, Jonathan Palmer. Alesi finished that race in fourth place, way ahead of Palmer in tenth and even ahead of multiple world champion Nelson Piquet.
In many ways, Alesi’s debut resembles that of Ollie Bearman’s debut this year in Saudi Arabia. And just like with Bearman, there were suddenly a lot of eyes on the young Alesi. He stayed with Tyrrell for the rest of the season and the next. Tyrrell was a midfield team back then, comparable with how Alpine was last year: not terrible, not great, and every now and then they could perform well enough.
| Jean Alesi | |
|---|---|
| Year of first win | 1995 |
| Races before first win | 91 |
| Podiums before first win | 15 |
Alesi proved that the next year, scoring the first two podiums of his F1 career. His stock was high and he was very much in demand with all the top teams when his contract expired. Ultimately, he would go to Ferrari where he’d rack up an impressive eleven more podiums in the next four seasons. In fact, during those four years at Ferrari, Alesi would only finish outside of the points a total of five times.
Unreliability made Alesi unlucky
But the keyword there is “finish”. The Ferrari in those days had a terrible track record when it came to reliability. Combine that with a fair amount of mistakes by Alesi, and you get to some incredible statistics. In his first five and a half years in Formula 1, Alesi drove 85 races. He finished on the podium in 13 of those races and registered points finishes in 17 more races. But he retired from a race a staggering 41 times.
And that summarized Alesi’s career by the time he entered the 1995 season. On his day, he could duke it out with the best of the best, going toe-to-toe with drivers like Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Michael Schumacher. But so often, his races would be ruined by mechanical failures or bad luck. He had been with Ferrari for four years by that point but had never managed to win a race. And due to all the retirements, his best championship result was a 5th place. What made this especially jarring was that he had chosen to go to Ferrari instead of Williams, right as Williams began dominating the early 90’s. It was all more than enough reason to make him reconsider his place in Maranello.
The Canadian Grand Prix
On June 11th that year, F1 rocked up to Canada for the sixth round of the season. Alesi had gotten two more podiums already that year, but also two more DNF’s. The race was a little bit special, because it was also Alesi’s 31st birthday. The race started under slightly wet conditions, and you’d think that with all the bad luck Alesi had suffered he’d be caught out by the rain or have his car fail on him again.
But whatever voodoo curse had been plaguing him so far was suddenly lifted and instead spread out over the rest of the grid. The other drivers started dropping like flies. Some of them crashed or spun because of the rain, but the vast majority dropped out with technical issues. By lap 61 of 68, only nine drivers remained in the race. This would usually mean that Schumacher would just cruise to an easy victory, but even he couldn’t escape the mechanical gremlins that had taken over the track. An electrical failure meant that his car wouldn’t get out of third gear anymore. He had to go into the pits for a new steering wheel and a complete system reboot, trapping him in the pitlane for over 70 seconds.
This - obviously - removed Schumacher from the lead, and handed it to Alesi. The Ferrari driver had driven an unremarkable race, but sometimes that’s all you need. He was one of just five drivers left on the lead lap and he had a comfortable gap to the driver in second. He kept it clean, kept his head cool, and when the checkered flag fell at the end of lap 68, he was finally a race winner in Formula 1.
And it was a good thing that the flag fell at that moment, because as Alesi was doing his victory lap, his car ran out of fuel and came to a stop halfway through the circuit. Fans climbed over the barriers to meet the Frenchman out on track, who had gotten out of his car and stood on top of it as the car slowed to a halt. Schumacher came by a little later and gave Alesi a lift to the podium on top of his own car, celebrating the win together with Alesi.
It would prove to be a bit of a bittersweet moment, because this first victory would also be Alesi’s only win in Formula 1. Just a few hours after the race, rumors began to circulate that Ferrari had signed Schumacher to replace Alesi; rumors that would eventually be proven true. Alesi would take Schumacher’s place at Benetton where he would score a further 13 podiums. But after clashing with team owner and recurring F1 villain Flavio Briatore, he left the team after two seasons. Alesi would spend some more seasons at Sauber, Prost and Jordan, but after the 2001 season he signed off on Formula 1 and decided to try his luck in other racing competitions. But that one afternoon in Canada in 1995, he was the man of the hour and a proud F1 race winner.