The fallout of the Aston star’s Australian GP penalty still hung in the air at Suzuka. What price the Spaniard joining Mercedes for 2025 now?
ALEX KALINAUCKAS
“ I think it was my best weekend. I don’t know. Or the top five. Inside the top five ever, for me.” At the classic, brilliant Formula 1 venue of Suzuka, we saw and heard both adjectives in and from Fernando Alonso, too. His assessment after taking his Aston Martin to sixth in Sunday’s race – a day after he’d qualified fifth – brings in another one: vintage Alonso. His unique brand of hyperbole was back on full display. And deservedly so.
Suzuka was, after all, a venue where Aston trailed its frontrunning rivals badly on F1’s previous visit just six months ago. Its 2024 position in the pecking order means that ninth place is its baseline expectation. And Lance Stroll’s pitiful weekend in the other AMR24 again highlighted the heights to which Alonso can elevate the team single-handedly.
He capped his run to sixth with a superb effort to hold off Oscar Piastri and George Russell in the closing stages, having dropped back from the podium fight early on while keeping his fragile soft tyres alive, all while holding off Piastri. He then dropped the Australian before warding off McLaren’s second-stop undercut attempt. Late on, Alonso evoked memories of Carlos Sainz’s famous 2023 Singapore GP win in repeatedly altering his energy deployment in the long run to the chicane – at one stage even hanging back to wait for Piastri – to ensure the McLaren got DRS to aid its own attempt to hold off the charging Mercedes. Canny.
“I don’t know what to say any more after Australia, let’s see if I get disqualified for the rest of the championship,” he then joked post-race of his Suzuka tactics to Spanish television channel DAZN.
The F1 paddock knew that the decision to penalise him for his part in the ‘brake test’ controversy – after Russell dramatically crashed in the Aston’s wake in the final moments of the Melbourne race – still rankled for Alonso in Japan. Just three days earlier, the reaction and fallout from the saga had dominated F1’s news agenda. Alonso was defiant, if not fully fired up – at the same time wanting to draw a line under his botched tactics. What didn’t help was the unusual split in the driving cohort regarding what the Spaniard had done in putting Russell off at an Albert Park corner that is being assessed for significant changes for 2025 as a result of the recent crashes there.
