“At 41, Fernando Alonso has still ‘got it’: that driver awareness, a skill that is quite rare, is still present”
JOHNNY HER BERT
JONATHAN BUSHELL
Fernando Alonso arriving at Aston Martin, at 41? You only have to look at his sprint race first laps last year to see he’s still ‘got it’: that driver awareness, a skill that is quite rare, is still present. He still knows where to place himself, where he needs to be, and his race pace has been very good. We didn’t see the full potential last year because of the reliability issues he suffered at Alpine, but without those he would have scored more heavily.
From my experience, racecraft doesn’t disappear with age. When I left F1 and did my sports car stuff, the racer skill was still there. As I grew older, there were specific issues with my old foot injuries, but beyond that the first thing I started to struggle with was qualifying. Then mistakes in a race situation started to creep in, not so much in F1 but in my subsequent sports car drives. We haven’t seen any sign of that from Alonso at this stage.