Why the perception of Alonso's Aston Martin switch has transformed

Much has changed in the five months between 1 August 2022 and the first day of the new year. Britain made its way through a couple more prime ministers, crowned a winner of Strictly Come Dancing and Benoit Blanc solved another murder. In that same short period, the perception of Fernando Alonso jumping the Alpine ship to sign for Aston Martin has transformed completely.

Only four days after Sebastian Vettel joined the murky world of social media to announce his retirement from grand prix racing, news broke that Alonso would be filling the void left by his fellow world champion at Lawrence Stroll’s squad. It is known that Alpine was dragging its feet with contract negotiations. Alonso wanted a firm two-year extension but was only being offered the one as his employer tried to keep the camp of FIA Formula 2 and 3 champion Oscar Piastri sweet.

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The Spaniard was also growing tired of his unreliable ground-effects car and was working in a sometimes-fractious relationship with team-mate Esteban Ocon. Nevertheless, a switch to Aston didn’t look like so much of a sideways step but a backwards one.

The green team had just notched a single point in the Hungarian GP courtesy of Vettel. F1’s formerly overachieving underdog squad was a fairly catastrophic ninth in the standings ahead of only rank backmarker Williams. Alpine, meanwhile, was growing into the fight for fourth place to land ‘best of the rest honours’ ahead of McLaren.

Even Alonso concedes he wasn’t getting carried away when he signed on the dotted line. He said after testing a sticker-free Aston in Abu Dhabi: “I’m much more optimistic now. When I signed for Aston Martin, I was 90% happy. When they started improving and finished the season on a high, I was 100%. This morning, I was 100 and now I’m 100-plus.”

Come the start of 2023, his move now appears to be an utterly logical decision. That’s despite there being no major turning point. Alpine still ended the term behind only Red Bull, Ferrari, and Mercedes. Although Aston rose to seventh, leapfrogging budget-limited Haas and underperforming AlphaTauri was hardly a landmark turnaround. Its strategy, tyre management and consistency were all still rightfully scrutinised.

Now, though, there’s a convincing case in favour of Aston possessing the more promising trajectory compared to Alpine – even in this cost cap age where Canadian billionaire Stroll can’t spend his way to success quite so freely.

Alonso has enjoyed his first impressions with Aston Martin

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

Firstly, a brand-spanking new Silverstone factory is nearing completion. Aston expects to move into its new digs in the second half of this year. That’s quite the construction job given that, following a two-year delay owing to the pandemic, the ground was only broken in September 2021. A new windtunnel is then expected to start contributing to the 2025 challenger and beyond.

Alpine’s premises, by comparison, have already received investment. While there hasn’t been an entirely new development at Enstone, even Alonso would have had to re-learn his way around the corridors since his 2005 and 2006 success there.

After the team was brought to its knees under the previous Lotus guise, the building internals were completely redeveloped. Although newish team principal Otmar Szafnauer has focused on better integrating the Enstone and Viry campuses and this work is yet to bear all of its fruit, it seems that Aston’s state-of-the-art, purpose-built facility might offer the higher ceiling.

Of course, if Aston must wait until at least 2026 to fully design its car in the new windtunnel, it’s unrealistic to expect even Alonso to be racing for the team at the grand old age of 44. So, the ultimate potential of Aston versus Alpine might be considered a moot point in the context of his move. But there is further evidence in the short-term to suggest that he’s done better than simply swap a frying pan for a fire.

Alonso is divisive and can be destructive to a team. His temperamental nature has much more potential to destabilise Aston than the always convivial Vettel's

Aston lost the first third of its season to constructing and then developing an ultimately flawed ground-effects car concept. While it became something of a punchline to compare the upgraded machine that broke cover in the Spanish GP to the Red Bull RB18 benchmark, the design rethink nevertheless showed Aston had learned the error of its way as it extracted more performance from its uber-reliable racer.

A big percentage of that turnaround, and the impressive success rate of the subsequent updates packages lavished on the AMR22, were credited to Dan Fallows. The ex-Red Bull head of aerodynamics was offered an early release to his contract to come and work for Stroll from April onwards.

Now, having had the rest of the season to integrate himself and a complete winter to oversee the birth of the AMR23, there’s sound reason to expect Aston to climb the competitive order with him onboard. Even if it’s a mammoth task to bridge the 118-point deficit to Alpine over one off-season, you might expect Aston to at least deprive Alfa Romeo of sixth since the two outfits tied on 55 points.

Aston Martin and Alonso will be one of the key talking points in 2023

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

Then there’s what Alonso can offer as a driver. He is divisive and can be destructive to a team. His temperamental nature has much more potential to destabilise Aston than the always convivial Vettel's. If Ocon’s complaints about carrying out the lion’s share of troubleshooting are true, Alonso’s debriefs won’t have a patch on Vettel’s thoroughness to help expedite car development either.

But, after a season from the Spaniard that was as impressive as anything he has delivered since his previous peak in 2012, advancing age and a sportscar sabbatical clearly haven’t diminished his speed.

The absence of further world titles can be attributed more to his bad career choices that came through political fallout. Vettel cannot make the same case. Even if Ferrari let him down in 2017, it was the German that let slip the following campaign. While a touch harsh, his decorations were unquestionable aided by affinity with a maligned degradable tyre and aerodynamic regulations that suited his style.

That is all a polite way of writing that, perhaps in the same car, you might reasonably expect Alonso to find a tenth or two over Vettel. In the final two rounds in Brazil and Abu Dhabi, Alpine held an average ‘supertime’ of 0.962% compared to Aston’s 1.24%. Lay that over a standard 90-second lap and just 0.25s splits the cars. Should Alonso make up some of that gap himself then it seems his Aston switch can, in more ways than one, pay off more handsomely than many first considered.

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Photo by: Michael Potts / Motorsport Images