The Imola Grand Prix was the single worst result Fernando Alonso ever achieved in his career. He drove in nineteenth for most of the race and struggled to overtake the Alpines and the Saubers. What was going on?
Every driver can have a lesser weekend, it happens to the best of them. But this wasn’t exactly that. Alonso already crashed during practice, then he qualified last, and during the race he couldn’t even catch up with the likes of Logan Sargeant or Guanyu Zhou. That’s not “a lesser weekend”, that’s an absolute disaster. It’s a stark contrast compared to this time last year, when Alonso was finishing on the podium almost every weekend and chasing down Sergio Perez for second in the standings.
It’s not down to Alonso
It’s easy to blame the driver for a bad result, but I honestly don’t think that’s the case here. As I said before: just a year ago, he was challenging for second in the championship. Plus, this is Fernando Alonso. He has twenty years of experience and has driven everything, from championship winning cars to absolute dumpster fires. His Ferrari F14T tried to kill him every chance it got. His McLaren MP4-30 was barely faster than a Formula 2 car. And yet Alonso still did better in those than this past weekend.
And don’t forget that Alonso has been doing moderately well this season. He has been able to take the fight to Mercedes and he has outperformed his teammate in almost every race this season. So I don’t think you can put this down to a skill issue on his end of things.
The track didn’t help
So then if it’s not the driver, then what was the issue? Well, part of the problem comes down to the track itself. Imola is a track not very suitable for the current state that F1 is in. The race itself, as well as the Formula 2 support races the same weekend, showed that it is incredibly difficult to overtake at Imola. As soon as cars got into the dirty air of the car in front of them, they slowed down a lot and couldn’t get close enough for an overtake, even if they were faster. Meaning that qualifying essentially dictated the race result. So if you’re starting last, like Alonso was, then you’re gonna have a real struggle to make your way up the field.
What about the car?
Aston Martin brought upgrades to this weekend. A lot. They all targeted one specific element of the car: the local load distribution. Put simply, Aston massively increased the amount of physical force that pushes on the car. In theory that should help with the tyre performance and therefore increase the speed of the car. But the downside is that it also alters the balance of the car and the way the car responds in corners. Which might explain why Alonso was suddenly struggling to keep his car out of the gravel this whole weekend.
There is also the fact that Alonso and team mate Lance Stroll ran two different set-ups. That probably plays a large role in why Stroll was able to finish within the points, while Alonso struggled to get out of last place. It probably also didn’t help that his brakes caught fire midway through the race. Alonso said after the race that he and the team are essentially treating this weekend as one long practice session and that they will analyze the data later this week to figure out whether it’s down to the set-up or not.
What’s next?
So what does this mean for the rest of the season? Well, expect something very similar next race in Monaco. Like Imola, Monaco is also a track that’s difficult to overtake on and where qualifying is crucial for a good race result. And it’s highly unlikely that Aston Martin will have figured out what went wrong here before the next race.
Longer term, there are two likely scenarios. Either Alonso adapts the same set-up that Stroll used in Imola and figures out a way to make the car work, or Aston Martin reverses this upgrade package and goes back to their pre-Imola loadout, at least for Alonso’s car. I personally think the second option is more likely. It’s what Aston Martin did last year as well when their upgrade package didn’t really work out that well. Because even if you set aside the issues that Alonso had, Stroll still didn’t outpace the Mercedes cars and he was even struggling with Yuki Tsunoda. So at the very least, the upgrade package didn’t bring Aston Martin that big step forward they had hoped.
The bigger question is how much longer this pattern will continue. We know that Alonso isn’t the most patient man when his team is struggling to make sense of it all, but neither is owner Lawrence Stroll. He invested billions in the team, and he didn’t do that just to be in the fight for fourth position. The team will have to bring some good results soon, otherwise there might be some internal changes coming.