Despite difficulties, Alonso remains one of the best

Fernando Alonso finished on the podium six times in the first half of last year’s championship, but has yet to finish in the top three in 2024.

The best result of the 43-year-old Formula 1 veteran remains the 5th place in Jeddah at the end of the second stage of the season, but the Spanish press, when analyzing Alonso’s performance, comes to the conclusion that he is still giving the best of himself – as always. The problem is not with him, but with the Aston Martin car, which is not very efficient this year.

At the same time, the picture at the beginning of the season was slightly better: Fernando showed a 6th result in qualifying in Bahrain, 4th in Saudi Arabia, 5th in Japan and in China he started generally from 3rd position. Then the results started to drop, but not because Alonso slowed down, but because the rivals were able to improve by modernizing the equipment, while the team from Silverstone did not succeed.

Alonso’s average starting position in the first 14 races is estimated at 9.5, but it must be taken into account that usually only the drivers of the four strongest teams, racing in clearly faster cars, were ahead of him.

The ranking of the best qualifying in 2024 is again led by Max Verstappen, who has already started from pole 8 times, but Fernando does not lose that much to Sergio Perez, his teammate at Red Bull Racing, who drives the same RB20. The average starting position of a Mexican is an 8.7. Although I have to admit that things have been going very badly for him lately.

In racing, Alonso has a harder time due to the fact that the AMR24 does not cope well with long series of laps: Aston Martin is inferior to many in terms of racing speed and is only in 7th place in this indicator. However, thanks to his skill and professionalism, Fernando remains in 9th place in the personal ranking – especially in races he sometimes managed to stay ahead of Mercedes cars, although this team has improved a lot lately. Again, unlike Aston Martin.

Alonso has 49 points so far, most of which were scored at the beginning of the season, but as always one of the objective indicators can be considered a comparison with a teammate who has exactly the same car. He was ahead of Lance Stroll in 9 of the 14 races; the score of their qualifying duels is the same: 9:5. At the same time, the Canadian has half as many points. It is also worth noting that Fernando finished in all the Grands Prix that took place, i.e. So far he has not had a single meeting.

It’s hard to predict how the second half of the season will unfold, although Aston Martin F1 principal Mike Krak hopes the team can perform better than the first. What is certain is that Alonso will continue to try to overcome the car’s imperfections, and if the AMR24 becomes more efficient, we will see this reflected in the Spaniard’s results.