Matt Bishop: Alonso & Stroll are about to make mind-boggling F1 history

As the late-summer sun glints off the Caspian Sea this coming Sunday, September 21, the 2025 Azerbaijan Grand Prix will deliver an arcane, yet oddly evocative, piece of Formula 1 history: the first time that any one team’s two drivers will have driven a combined total of 600 F1 grands prix. Yes, really. Six hundred.

The team is Aston Martin. In Baku this weekend Fernando Alonso will start his 418th F1 grand prix – a magnum opus that is becoming so gargantuan that it is beginning to feel mythological – while Lance Stroll will notch up his 182nd. Pause for a moment. Let those numbers settle in your mind. Six hundred F1 grands prix in one two-driver team. When you remind yourself that double world champion Alberto Ascari drove 32 grands prix, that quintuple world champion Juan Manuel Fangio drove 51, that double world champion Jim Clark drove 72, and that triple world champion Jackie Stewart drove 99, Alonso’s and Stroll’s 600 stat truly boggles the mind.

The contrast between Fernando and Lance is about as striking as it is possible to imagine between two 21st-century F1 drivers. Why so? Well, for many reasons, not least because the former, aged 44, has spent the past quarter-century being one of F1’s most devastatingly effective competitors, while the latter, aged 26, has spent his F1 career being sometimes quick, more often lacklustre, and perennially scrutinised for the source of his race seat rather than the scope of his talent.

From the moment Alonso charged into the 2001 F1 season in a humble Minardi PS01, his trajectory was unmistakable. Here was a baby-faced 19-year-old whose hands and feet were palpably skilled and, despite his being discomfitingly shy with strangers, was possessed by a level of steely ambition that was already apparent to those who cared to look. Two F1 drivers’ world championships followed soon after, in 2005 and 2006, with Renault. He won grands prix in 2007, too, at McLaren, but he burned his bridges there — albeit temporarily — when he tried to stoke then failed to douse a series of political fires within that grand, proud, yet suddenly beleaguered team. He returned to a less-than-stellar Renault for 2008 and 2009, where he won races again, once brilliantly (Japan 2008) and once controversially (Singapore that same year). For six seasons he wrestled lethargic Ferraris into world title battles in which they had little business being participants. He then went back to McLaren, earning $160 million (about £120 million) in four miserable seasons in which the highlights, if you can call them that, were a quartet of fifth places. And now, improbably, after taking a break from F1 to win the Le Mans 24 Hours twice, he continues to outqualify his Aston Martin team-mate Stroll weekend after weekend, as though by divine and bloody-minded right, his now grizzled jawline chiseled by undimmed willpower.

Stroll, on the other hand, has walked a very different path – although ‘walked’ may be too active a term, for his story is one for ever entangled with the golden thread of the paternal megabucks that have propelled him every step of the way. It is one thing to arrive in F1 with resources; but it is quite another to remain, abidingly unsuccessful and ostensibly unhappy, season after season. Yet remain he has, and remain he does.

To be fair, he is very talented, and, as a result, ever since his F1 debut, with Williams in 2017, he has delivered flashes of real pace. He has shown courage in the wet too, a penchant for fast starts, and moments of genuinely admirable racecraft. But he has also found himself adrift, often outqualified and outraced by team-mates whose CVs are sharper as well as longer.

“When Stroll enters, people check whether there may be an IT compliance meeting that they forgot about.”

Let’s be blunt – but fair. On paper, in numbers, in hardware and headlines, Alonso’s F1 record is galaxies beyond Stroll’s. Two drivers’ world championships versus none. Thirty-two grand prix wins to zero. One hundred and six podiums against three. Pole positions? Twenty-two for Alonso, while Stroll has a single outlier – albeit a fine one, in Turkey in 2020, but a lonely beacon nonetheless. Fastest laps? Alonso edges it 26-nil. And if you are the kind of person who values intangibles – wit, charisma, eloquence – well, when Alonso walks into a room the room adjusts itself. When Stroll enters, people check whether there may be an IT compliance meeting that they forgot about.

But to reduce their pairing to one of imbalance is to miss its peculiar and intriguing charm. One is a virtuoso whose name will echo through F1 paddocks long after his eventual departure, whose every race is yet another aria in a bewitchingly compelling opera. The other is a consistent if occasionally curious presence, a gifted but distracted racer whose privilege overshadows his passion, yet whose longevity deserves respect nonetheless, even though his total of 182 grand prix starts feels a bit like a stat that he has almost unwittingly stumbled upon.