The Saturday morning tricks that expose Alonso's true mindset

The view from the Red Bull Ring media centre is one of the best of the Formula 1 season. It not only offers a great panorama of the pitlane, the track and the mountains beyond, but, if you get the right desk, it affords a brilliant view of the run out of the final corner too. It’s a great place to note the speed, lines and positioning of the cars through and from the exit of Turn 10, before they briefly disappear from view behind the roof edge of the one of the start/finish straight grandstands.

The benefit of that rhythm of cars ducking in and out of view in Saturday morning’s second free practice session last weekend actually acted as an alert to one car regularly doing something slightly different. They didn’t disappear from view as they were on a completely different line as they ran down past the pits so stayed in view throughout.

Indeed, for lap after lap in the middle phase of FP2, the blue Alpine of Fernando Alonso was ducking off the racing line and instead blasting down the right hand side of the grid. A quick double check of where pole position was, and where Alonso was due to take up his eighth slot, during delivered the answer about exactly what he doing: cleaning his starting spot.

The sprint race weekend format, with a practice session following qualifying, offers drivers an opportunity to know in advance where they start on the grid. So FP2 gives them a chance to make sure their grid place is as clean and grippy as possible. And having done his best to clean it during the session, Alonso also wasn’t going to let slip an opportunity to lay down rubber in it either afterwards for the post-FP2 practice starts.

He backed off after the flag, letting rivals through to try to position himself in the right place in the train, so as to do a practice start from his actual eighth spot. Unfortunately, he ended up further up the queue than he would have liked.

F1’s rules demand that drivers have to pull ‘as far forward on the grid as possible’ for their starts, so Alonso actually found himself being shuffled to sixth spot – that of Kevin Magnussen who would start directly ahead of him in the sprint.

It obviously was not in Alonso’s interest to do a burn out and lay rubber down in Magnussen’s spot, as that would be handing the advantage to his rival, so he cleverly did the next best thing. He stopped short of the sixth grid box, where Magnussen’s car would line up, and he did his practice start from there; knowing that, later on, the extra rubber laid in front of P8 could be of benefit to him in those split second moments off the line.

Alonso stopped short of Magnussen's P6 grid slot when doing practice starts in FP2 to lay down rubber for his sprint race launch

Photo by: Jon Noble

Although an ECU failure shortly before the start of the sprint left Alonso’s car stranded before the formation lap, so his efforts to boost his start did not gain him anything, what his actions earlier in the day proved is that the Spaniard is as sharp and focused as he has ever been. “It’s still there,” smiled Alpine team boss Otmar Szafnauer later in the day when discussing the tricks and Alonso’s ultra-competitive instinct.

While the initial races of his F1 comeback last year were perhaps more difficult than he anticipated, the 2022 season has left no one in any doubt that Alonso remains at the top of his game. He’s fully gelled with the Alpine team; his qualifying and race pace have been brilliant at times, and his grid-cleaning antics in Austria show he still does not miss any opportunity that’s laid out for him. The desire to win remains as strong as ever.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of his 2022 campaign is that the actual results have not been a match for the potential shown on track. Considering what could have been a pole position in Australia, a front row start in Canada and pace that, at times (like the final stint in Austria), has matched and beaten Mercedes, he is still only 10th in the standings on 29 points – 23 behind team-mate Esteban Ocon.

"He still loves racing. He’s a massive competitor, he loves competing and I think, in life in general, you’re happy when you exceed expectations" Otmar Szafnauer

Szafnauer likens the lack of reward for the speed shown as the worst he has seen in F1 since Takuma Sato endured a hugely frustrating 2004 campaign for BAR. Back then, the Japanese driver qualified in the top three four times that season but a run of reliability failures – that put him out of six grands prix – left him languishing much further down the order than he deserved.

“We had so many engine failures with Honda when he was in points-scoring positions, and it was always him,” said Szafnauer, who was at Honda at the time. “So, I have seen it. It’s not that we’re failing Fernando. There’s a variety of reasons as to why he’s not scoring points.

“I can remember Mick Schumacher losing it [in Imola], hitting him, the sidepod coming loose. I can remember him defending in Canada against [Valtteri] Bottas and getting penalised in Miami. There’s all sorts of things.”

Alonso, though, is not getting too disheartened by everything that has gone against him. He is wise enough to know that, if he continues showing the pace that's been on display so far this year, as well as a few of his clever tricks, the luck will turn and the results will come. You sense, talking to him, that he takes immense satisfaction from his performances being noticed; even if the poles and wins are not there yet.

Alonso has not become disheartened by his lack of results and enjoying working at being better than he was prior to his F1 departure

Photo by: Motorsport Images

“I'm enjoying it,” he smiled when this writer asked him last weekend about the satisfaction he is getting from F1 right now. “I miss winning, and I miss the feeling of fighting for podiums and bigger things - yes. But at the same time, I'm enjoying also because it's a race against yourself in a way, and trying to be a better version of myself than what I was in 2019.

“I think last year, I was performing at a decent level. It was okay, but not at my 100% I will say, and this year I feel at my 100% this year. I feel that I can put some performance that maybe are not expected and these kind of things. That has been always my strength all over my career, and I feel that I'm back to that level – so that probably makes me very proud of this comeback.”

And for Alpine, the speed and devotion to the cause that is delivering a happy Alonso is exactly what’s needed. As Szafnauer said about the situation Alonso is in right now: “From what I can see he still loves racing. He’s a massive competitor, he loves competing and I think, in life in general, you’re happy when you exceed expectations.

“So if your expectations are realistic and you exceed them, you’re happy in life. Not just Fernando, I think all of us.”

Second on the grid in wet qualifying at Montreal showed Alonso is performing at his best

Photo by: Carl Bingham / Motorsport Images