At 44 years old, Fernando Alonso is the oldest driver on the grid and the only active two-time world champion in the championship. He is stranded at the bottom of the constructors’ standings with a project that, according to those who follow it closely, will take years to deliver what it promised. F1 commentator Alex Jacques said it plainly: the time Aston Martin needs to become competitive and the time Alonso has left in the sport will probably not align.

The promise was enormous. The partnership between Aston Martin and Honda, combined with the arrival of Adrian Newey — the most decorated aerodynamicist in Formula 1 history, responsible for championship-winning cars at Williams, McLaren and Red Bull — generated expectations rarely seen around a team outside the front row. The first car designed under his leadership at Silverstone was meant to be the turning point. Instead, the AMR26 opened the season with chronic reliability issues, steering wheel vibrations affecting both drivers, and performance that has left it last in the constructors’ championship.

Jacques acknowledged the project’s foundations. “Adrian has never failed at a Formula 1 team since the early ’90s when he joined Williams,” the commentator said. “Honda always comes good. It just takes a while. Even when they switched, they built it in 2014, raced it in 2015, and they won with their power unit in 2019. They had to switch from McLaren to Red Bull to do that with Max Verstappen.” The logic holds: the talent is there, the resources are there, and Honda has a track record of success in F1 that no other manufacturer can match. “There is an inevitability, if everyone can stay patient, that they have the designer, they have the resource, and Honda always gets it right. It’s just a matter of time.”

The problem is precisely that: time. “The downside is it’s going to take literally years for them to be anywhere near to what we expected them to be,” Jacques added. When asked directly whether this could be the end of Alonso’s F1 career, Jacques did not sidestep. “He’s 44 years old. I love seeing his starts. I love the fact you look at the page and it says he’s tenth. How is he tenth? How are you all guys on the grid getting done by a 44-year-old?”

It is a compliment that stings. Alonso’s brilliance on track — still evident, still capable of extracting the maximum from an inferior car — sits in sharp contrast with a project that is realistically looking toward 2028, 2029 or even 2030 as its competitive horizon. Team principal Mattia Binotto has said as much without hesitation: Aston Martin is not here to create miracles. And miracles are precisely what Alonso would need to see this project deliver within his active career.

Formula 1 has seen extraordinary drivers trapped in projects that arrived too late. The question the paddock quietly asks is whether the man who won two world championships — and who at 44 still outdrives his machinery — deserves that fate.

Thumbnail credit: By courtesy of Pirelli