Matt Bishop: 'Alonso has begun his final act in F1. Don't expect a fairytale ending'

As far as Fernando Alonso was concerned, the first grand prix of the 2026 Formula 1 season could not by any normal definition be described as a race. No, Alonso’s brief Sunday drive around Melbourne’s pretty Albert Park was an extended reconnaissance mission conducted at moderate speed and under conditions mortifying for the Aston Martin team members on the ground. He completed 21 laps during rather than in the race, trundling around in a machine that possessed all the competitive vigour of a 1997 Mastercard Lola, before he was summoned to the pits for good. As a post-race statement from Aston Martin explained with a candour that bordered on the apologetic, “When it became clear we could not compete for points, we chose to pit and check the cars over; the team then asked Fernando to retire the car to preserve the components.”

In truth, the explanation was the kind of vapid bromide that too often it has been my misfortune to have to compose in the past, for the metallic green cars had been an embarrassment all weekend. They were worse than uncompetitive; they were barely viable. Even though Alonso’s genius has been burnished by years of coaxing impossible lap times and improbable results out of reluctant machinery, saddled as he was on Sunday with an Aston Martin-Honda AMR26, he looked about as capable of giving his Australian fans anything to cheer as would Carlos Alcaraz had he been asked to enter this year’s Australian Open using a frying pan instead of his Babolat Pure Aero 98 racquet.

To add a distressingly illiterate twist to such a humiliatingly plaintive communication, Aston Martin’s post-race statement was initially attributed to Adrian Newey as “team principle” [sic], although, to be fair to the team’s beleaguered social media admins, that solecism was quickly corrected. I felt a flicker of sympathy for Newey, whose reputation rests on the elegant grammar of aerodynamic surfaces rather than press office copy. Even so, his car’s underperformance is the result of a shortfall in its chassis efficacy as well as its power unit’s more evident deficiencies, and the misspelling seemed oddly symbolic: a team in search of guiding principles instead finding only insoluble problems.

Alonso himself, less irascible now than he used to be, delivered diplomatic platitudes about learning, gathering data, and hoping for progress. A more revealing summation came from his team-mate Lance Stroll. Asked afterwards, “At least you did some racing — have you learned anything?”, the team owner’s son replied with disarming unreserve: “Well, ‘racing’ is a strong word. We circulated.” Harsh but fair. Genuinely, I hope things improve before too long.

If you read this column regularly, you will know that I am fond of marking anniversaries. So, with that and Alonso in mind, all I can say is: what a difference two decades make. Yes, almost 20 years ago to the day, on March 12, 2006, the F1 season kicked off not in Melbourne, Australia, but in Manama, Bahrain; and the Fernando Alonso who arrived there inhabited an altogether different universe from that which he grins and bears today.

Then he was the 24-year-old reigning F1 world champion, the standard-bearer of youthful brilliance, the chipper lad who the previous year had ended the seemingly eternal reign of Michael Schumacher. His car — the gorgeous Renault R26, painted in a striking blue and yellow livery — looked fast even when it was standing still, like a kingfisher perched above a stream; and it was fast.

That afternoon in Bahrain produced a deliciously taut duel. Schumacher, at 37 still at the stratospheric height of his powers, a seven-time F1 world champion driving for Scuderia Ferrari, refused to yield an inch. Alonso, calm and precise, matched him move for move. Strategy, tyre management, pitstops, and raw pace intertwined in a contest that felt less like a motor race and more like an intricate symphony played by two great artists, their knuckles whitened by the sheer effort of their bloody-minded determination to prevail. In the end, it was Alonso who did so.

He crossed the finish line just 1.246sec ahead of Schumacher, a margin that in F1 terms is both little and large: the distance between triumph and frustration, and between adulation and polite applause. It was a victory that confirmed Alonso’s reputation as a racing gladiator and hinted at a future dynasty. He looked not only quick but also somehow inevitable, as though he had already sketched in confident strokes the future outline of the sport and was now simply colouring it in.

Looking back at it now, 2006 glows with a kind of nostalgic luminosity, for grand prix goers could thrill to the sight of races contested by small, light, good-looking F1 cars; could relish being deafened by naturally aspirated non-hybrid internal combustion engines, 20 V8s and two V10s, some of which screamed their way to more than 20,000rpm; and could stare in awe at grids sprinkled with names that have since passed into racing folklore: Schumacher and Alonso, yes, but also Kimi Räikkönen, Juan Pablo Montoya, Jacques Villeneuve, Rubens Barrichello, David Coulthard, Jenson Button, Felipe Massa, Mark Webber, Robert Kubica, Giancarlo Fisichella, Jarno Trulli, and Nico Rosberg, and more besides, fine drivers all, most of whom were already superstars and some of whom were still awaiting fate to confer superstardom upon them. Yet here and now, from my vantage point, looking back 20 years, what stands out most vividly is Alonso himself: supremely self-assured, technically brilliant, and animated by the fierce competitive intelligence that has always been his defining trait.

Yet time is a mischievous author — and, over the intervening two decades, Fernando’s career has resembled a long and epic novel full of heroic acts, shocking events, narrative twists, and the occasional tragic subplot: a kind of Don Quixote on wheels. There was the McLaren face-off, the Ferrari near-miss, the wandering beyond F1 to Indianapolis and Le Mans, and the improbable renaissance when he returned to F1 after a two-year absence looking leaner, wiser, and still ferociously quick. Through it all ran a persistent theme: his uncanny ability to extract speed from machinery that sometimes seemed inadequate to the task. Again and again he has demonstrated that extraordinary blend of aggression and calculation — the racing driver’s equivalent of a virtuoso pianist capable of playing thunderous Rachmaninoff as well as delicate Ravel.

Which brings us back, rather melancholically, to Melbourne in 2026. Watching Alonso limp around Albert Park in a car that could not meaningfully compete felt faintly surreal. Here was a man whose instincts and reflexes remain razor-sharp, a driver whose skill set is so refined that younger drivers still study his on-board footage like theology students examining sacred texts. Yet the machine beneath him was so recalcitrant that the entire exercise bordered on the farcical. The contrast with 2006 could hardly be more abject. Then he was the sport’s ascendant monarch, commanding a beautifully balanced car and defeating a racing legend in open combat. Now he is a grizzled but still brilliant veteran marooned in machinery that struggles even to justify its presence on the grid. F1, which can sometimes resemble a grand opera of sporting and engineering ambition, has handed him the role of tragic hero: hugely experienced, immensely talented, immoderately rich, indefatigably popular, yet perpetually thwarted by circumstances beyond his control.

None of it diminishes his standing. If anything, it enhances it. Within the F1 paddock there remains a near-universal consensus that, given a genuinely competitive car, he could still win races as easily as do the likes of George Russell, Lando Norris, and even Max Verstappen. His racecraft has lost none of its subtlety, and his understanding of dynamic strategies, tyre management, and wheel-to-wheel combat is as sophisticated as ever it was. He is widely admired, and rightly so; but admiration does not slow the passing of time, and he is now halfway through his fifth decade.