[Formula 1] Fate hates Fernando Alonso feat. The Aston Martin F1 team

There's a dozen posts about F1 in this subreddit every month so I won't spend too much time telling you what Formula 1 is; fastest open-wheel racing championship sanctioned by the FIA, (as of 2026 again) 22 drivers, 11 teams and 20+ races all over the world to see who's fastest.

The 2026 season is of particular note as it brings with it brand-new engine regulations. Broadly speaking, the technical regulations governing the design of the cars can be broken into two categories: the rules surrounding the engine of the car, and the rules surrounding the chassis (pretty much everything that isn't the engine).

Engines, especially the ones used in F1, are expensive to build and VERY expensive to develop. So to keep the teams happy, F1 has stuck with the same engine regulations introduced in 2014 all the way til 2025, even though the chassis rules have changed several times.

The change in engine rules was primarily done to entice new manufacturers to join (which it succeeded at) but also brought much controversy (deserves its own post, really) and (combined with the brand-new chassis rules), much speculation as to which teams would rise and fall. New rules often come with unexpected winners and losers; it isn't unheard of for a former champion to fail to adapt or for a midfield team to notice a loophole no one else has and leapfrog ahead.

One team everyone had their eyes on was Aston Martin. The successor to the Racing Point/Force India outfit, they fell under their current owner, Canadian billionaire Lawrence Stroll, after he bought them out post bankruptcy. Prior to this, they had a reputation as a scrappy, reasonably competent midfield outfit. No one expected them to win races or challenge for titles, but they did well enough with their relatively low budget, and even managed to bag a few podiums along the way.

Their time as Aston Martin was much of the same; Stroll had injected a significant amount of cash, but building a race-winning team takes time. They had a strong showing in 2023, with Fernando Alonso (who'd signed with them the same year) bagging three consecutive P3 finishes at the start of the year and finishing the driver's championship in 4th place. Not bad, considering how 1st and 2nd were completely out of the question courtesy of the utterly dominant Red Bull Racing.

2024 was a bit disappointing in comparison, as was 2025, but the team really turned heads when they announced their signing of Adrian Newey. Newey was chief technical officer at Red Bull from 2006 til 2024, during which they won 7 World Drivers Championships, bagged the record for the most consecutive wins (15 for the team and 10 for Max Verstappen) and won every race except for 1 in the 2023 season. He'd also designed several race and championship winning cars before his time at Red Bull, and was widely considered one of the greatest technical minds in the paddock.

Aston Martin also announced a switch to Honda engines for the 2026 season. While Honda had officially dropped out of F1 as an engine supplier after 2021, they'd still supplied Red Bull until 2025. The manufacturer that had (re)entered F1 in 2015 to much ridicule (some at the hands of Honda-powered McLaren F1 driver Fernando Alonso) had successfully turned their image around, so when they announced a works partnership with Aston Martin, (works partnership means that the team usually gets significant input over the engine design) expectations were sky-high.

He's been mentioned in this post before, but let's talk about Fernando Alonso. He's the oldest and most experienced driver on the grid, and winner of the 2005 and 2006 driver's world championships. Since then, he's come close to a third title on multiple occasions, even in cars that had no business winning races. His last win was in 2013, since which he's been stuck in midfield or backmarker teams, including a stint at the then Honda powered McLaren F1 team from 2015 to 2018. The Honda engine at the time had major reliability issues, and was down on power to boot. This resulted in several iconic radio clips of an irate Fernando and a brief sabbatical, but as mentioned above Honda did eventually got their act together and Fernando found his way back to F1 after winning the 2018-19 World Endurance Championship.

While he may have been in several terrible cars, Fernando was never terrible in them. He consistently outperformed his teammates and never seemed to lose his edge, unlike some other world champions who'd found themselves in lacking machinery. He'd been unable to find a drive with Red Bull, Mercedes or Ferrari, all of whom had opted for younger drivers from their own development programs, but that didn't stop him from putting in some seriously impressive performances and gaining a reputation as the grids biggest 'what-if?' character.

As you can imagine, people were incredibly excited to see what he'd do in 2026. He was driving for a team with no shortage of cash, with a car designed by one of the best to ever do it, powered by an engine from the manufacturer who'd powered the winner of 4 of the last 5 world titles.

Aston Martin themselves issued some cautionary statements before pre-season testing, but the disappointment became very real when they failed to get much testing done at all because of poor reliability. Worse still, the Honda engine apparently has massive vibration issues, with Fernando and teammate Lance Stroll both remarking that they may not be able to complete a full race without suffering from nerve damage. NERVE DAMAGE. To top it all off, Newey publicly admitted that aerodynamically speaking, they were mid-field at best. As of the Japanese Grand Prix this weekend, they are yet to score any points but hey, at least one of their cars finally finished a race.

As for Alonso, it seems increasingly likely that he will retire at the end of the year, if not sooner. Hard to blame him, this season was supposed to be the light at the end of a very long tunnel, but fate appears to have pulled a Looney-Tunes fake-out on him and his fans.