Yahoo Autos Fernando Alonso Has Plenty Left in the Tank
When Fernando Alonso announced his return to F1 in 2020, it was a stunning choice. The driver that seemed so unhappy in his final seasons at a struggling McLaren not only chose to come back after two years away from the sport, he chose to do so with an Alpine team he had already left twice before. Onlookers were concerned the years away and struggles in the years before had set the 2005 and 2006 champion for failure on his return. He proved those concerns pointless very quickly.
This is the seventh installment of our driver-by-driver preview of the 2022 Formula 1 season. This weekend, we will be covering Alpine. You can find the rest of our previews here.
While it is still not entirely clear what drove the now 40-year-old Alonso to rejoin the F1 grid, any questions about his ability to stay competitive once he had were rendered irrelevant by an impressive season full of points-scoring finishes, strong qualifying performances, and even one signature drive, all in a down year for the Alpine team.
HOW HE GOT HERE
If you followed F1 before about 2015, you know Fernando Alonso better than all but two or three drivers on this grid. The 32-time race winner made his name by beating Michael Schumacher and Ferrari to two world championships in 2005 and 2006, then stayed a crucial part of every championship season through 2013.
His arrival in F1, by way of a great International Formula 3000 run in 2000 and a Minardi F1 seat in 2001, led him to a test-and-reserve role with Renault in 2002 and the race seat in 2003. He was a race-winner for the team in his first season, then stayed with them through the championship years before leaving for an ill-fated one-year stint as teammate to the rookie Lewis Hamilton at McLaren. After he and Hamilton both finished one point behind championship-winner Kimi Raikkonen, Alonso left for an even more ill-fated two season stint at Renault that ended with a scandal in Singapore called "crashgate." The affair left team leadership effectively banned from F1, but Alonso escaped to the prestigious life raft of Ferrari's #1 seat.
There, he fought for titles in four seasons before ultimately coming up short to Sebastian Vettel by varying degrees in each. A relatively weak 2014 saw him leave for a second stint at McLaren, the most ill-fated of his ill-fated runs with a prestigious team. Here, he served as the face of a downfall that had begun two years before he arrived, there to shoulder so much of the blame as the most famous man on a once-great team that was just beginning a winless streak that would stretch until this past season. It led him out of F1 entirely by 2018.
In his second-to-last year at McLaren, he skipped Monaco to run the Indianapolis 500. This ignited an interest in the world's great races that led him to two more 500 attempts (only one of which ended in a start) and an attempt at the 2020 Dakar Rally. Most significantly, though, it led him to Toyota's LMP1 program, where he won the 24 Hours of Le Mans twice in a TS050 with co-drivers Sebastian Buemi and Kazuki Nakajima. That trio won the FIA World Endurance Championship in the 2018-19 "super season" encompassing both races.
Alpine came calling when Daniel Ricciardo left before the 2021 season, a call Alonso happily answered. After years away from the sport, the two-time champion was back.
HOW 2021 WENT
Alonso did not miss a beat. He recorded just one podium, but he scored points in all but seven races and consistently fought within the middle of the points-scoring group. His teammate, Esteban Ocon, won an entire race, but he still found a way to finish ahead of Ocon in the championship standings and assert himself as the #1 driver at Alpine.
And Alonso was the star of Ocon's big day, too. It was his blocking against Lewis Hamilton that gave Ocon the gap he needed to pull away before the Mercedes lost any chance of catching up. Alonso had given an exceptional display of teamwork from a driver that had so often struggled with equal teammates, and the result was a win for his up-and-coming team.
GOALS FOR 2022
Like AlphaTauri's win with Pierre Gasly last season, the Ocon win was a bit of a fluke. The slower Alpine got to the front because of well-timed chaos and led the charge through excellent execution from both Ocon and Alonso. No team can count on seeing those conditions two years in a row, so, if either Alpine driver want to win a race again this year, the team will need to improve.
While they did not struggle as badly as Aston Martin or Mercedes, Alpine was a team that notably moved down the grid after an impressive 2020 season. They finished the same fifth in the constructor's standings, but their once-close battle with peers Ferrari, McLaren, and Racing Point had become a heavily stratified group. In 2022, a new car and a budget cap that should help mid-level teams far more than those below or above them should help the French outfit move back up the grid. If they do, Alonso's 2021 form would be fighting for regular podiums once again.
A SUCCESSFUL SEASON LOOKS LIKE...
Whether or not Alpine makes a car fast enough for those finishes to be podiums rather than top sixes, a successful 2022 for Fernando Alonso will be one where he did exactly what he did in 2021: Live up to his old standards. Alonso looked like he had no fight left at times in his last years at McLaren, but he was all fight at Alpine despite a decade and a half of seemingly known wisdom that he would not be the same driver if he weren't competing for wins while paired with a less effective teammate.
2021's version of Alonso seemed like yet another reinvention from one of the most decorated drivers in racing. In 2022, he'll be one of F1's best simply by keeping himself to that same standard.
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