Alonso disagrees with penalty points system

Fernando Alonso has eight penalty points; if he gets four more before March 24, 2025, he will have to miss the race. The Spaniard believes that this system now actually hinders the fight against rivals…

Fernando Alonso: “The penalty points system was created to separate dangerous drivers who kept accumulating penalties without being banned from racing or anything else. Not to endanger anyone on the track.

But now we confuse mistakes on the highway with dangerous driving. I made a mistake in turn three, hit Zhou and got a 10-second time penalty. Maybe Niko – or another driver, I don’t know – also made a mistake in the race and paid for it by giving the position back, a 5- or 10-second penalty. But these are just mistakes that have always been there and will always be there. I don’t see anything dangerous.

We deprive ourselves of the incentive to try to overtake, knowing that if we make a mistake we will get penalty points. That makes it sometimes better to stay behind. In fact, they force us to overtake with only DRS. In my opinion, this is wrong.

In the past we have tried to prevent dangerous drivers from endangering people every weekend, which is what happened when Grosjean had an accident at Spa, which took Lewis, me and someone else out of contention.

But we’ve never had so many rules as we do now. We can’t overtake in the pit lane, we can’t go fast in the pit lane, we can’t drive slowly on the track – we can’t do almost anything. Riders and teams are unhappy about over-regulation. We need to come together and find a solution, offer something that’s better than the current rules.

“When you’re racing, you trust other drivers and in the heat of the battle for points, for a podium or for a title, you forget about the rules. I’ve fought for the title five times in the last race, in the last moments of the season. How can you think about rules at a time like that? You overtake or defend, try to be fair and trust other drivers. That’s always been the case in racing.”