After the highs of his first season at Aston Martin, 2024 was a demoralising year for Fernando Alonso. The team gradually lost contact with the front-runners and slipped into the midfield.
In the year he celebrated his 43rd birthday, Alonso was no less quick and committed than ever. His form dipped somewhat when the team began to struggle, though this proved temporary.
The team enjoyed a decent start to the season. Alonso regularly qualified his AMR24 slightly higher than it deserved, and therefore slipped back in the race, but still took decent points finishes including fifth in Jeddah (ahead of both Mercedes, a Ferrari and a McLaren) and sixth in Japan.
That result in Jeddah proved to be the team’s best result of the year. Alonso achieved it by holding back George Russell, but he crossed a line attempting to do the same in Australia, slowing abruptly and early at high speed. The stewards correctly assessed the dangerous implications of Alonso’s tactics and issued him a stiff penalty. However their verdict on his tangle with Carlos Sainz Jnr in China – a clumsy but not cynical move – was harsh, and left Alonso justifiably concerned about his accumulation of penalty points.
The team’s season began to go awry in Miami, where Alonso nonetheless salvaged points again from 15th on the grid. But he was poor at Imola after crashing in practice, dropped out in Q1 at Monaco and had a puzzling off-weekend in Austria where he collided with Zhou Guanyu.
Fernando Alonso
| Best | Worst | |
|---|---|---|
| GP start | 3 | 20 |
| GP finish | 5 | 19 |
| Points | 70 | |
Surprisingly, Lance Stroll led Alonso home at Silverstone. They finished in the same order in Hungary, though that was after the team told Alonso to let his team mate through, and Stroll refused to give the place back when ordered to.
As Aston Martin drifted further from the pace, Alonso increasingly found himself occupying a ‘no man’s land’ between the four quickest cars and the rest (including his team mate). He continued to collect points fairly regularly, but the going got tough as the season entered its final quarter.
It said a lot about the difficulty Aston Martin experienced with their car late in the season that Alonso didn’t capitalise on the challenging conditions in Brazil. He showed his usual wet weather flair earlier in the season at Montreal, finishing sixth.
However Alonso rebounded to end the year on something of a high with points in the final two races. Aside from that early dip, this was another characteristically strong season, which gives F1’s most experienced driver every reason to believe he has another title in him.
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