“Age is a number. Pace is not.”
Biography
Last updated after the Mexico City Grand Prix.
By the Numbers
Career Timeline
Recent Form
Four retirements or lapped finishes in the last five races tells its own story. Alonso’s sole points finish in that stretch came in Malaysia, where he climbed from P12 to P8. Every other outing has produced nothing: two retirements and two lapped results.
For a driver who has accumulated 32 wins and 106 podiums across 447 starts since 2001, the current run is a stark illustration of where Aston Martin sits in the competitive order. The Malaysia result looks less like a turning point and more like an outlier in a sequence that has been consistently barren.
Latest Race
Alonso retired from the Mexico City Grand Prix having started P17, dropping five positions before the car stopped. It’s a second retirement in five races and extends a run that has yielded just four points since the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.
2026 So Far
Alonso sits P17 in the championship with 7 points and the trajectory is flat at best. A 26th season in Formula 1 since his 2001 debut, spread across eight teams, is producing the kind of return that reflects a car rather than a driver. The season hasn’t moved in any meaningful direction for weeks.
Latest News
Mexico GP: Honda failure ends Alonso's race in five laps
Fernando Alonso’s Mexico City Grand Prix was over almost before it began after a Honda power unit failure forced him out of the race within five laps, capping a brutal weekend for Aston Martin at Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez. The cruel part is that Friday had looked genuinely encouraging. Alonso was only 0.769 seconds off Charles Leclerc’s pace in FP2 and the AMR26s accumulated 144 laps across the two free practice sessions, suggesting the package was in reasonable shape. Honda’s Shintaro Orihara had flagged Mexico City as a particularly demanding circuit for the power unit ahead of the weekend, given the high altitude and the extended full-throttle sections that put sustained stress on the engine, but the scale of the failure will still have caught Aston Martin off guard. Alonso has had no shortage of reliability grief across his career and this latest retirement does nothing to help his points tally at a stage of the season where every finish counts. The Spaniard’s pace in practice suggested the AMR26 wasn’t entirely off the pace here, which makes the early exit even more frustrating to assess. Aston Martin will now need Honda to explain exactly what went wrong and confirm whether a grid penalty for a fresh power unit is on the horizon at the next round. For Alonso, it’s another afternoon of watching from the garage when he should have been racing.
Mexico GP: Alonso's race over after five laps
Fernando Alonso’s Mexico City Grand Prix ended almost before it began after the Honda power unit in his Aston Martin AMR26 failed just five laps into the race. The retirement was a bitter blow given how the weekend had looked up to that point. Alonso had shown genuine pace in practice, finishing FP2 only 0.769 seconds behind pacesetter Charles Leclerc, and the AMR26s had accumulated 144 laps of mileage across the free practice sessions without any obvious warning signs. Honda’s Shintaro Orihara had flagged the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez as a tough circuit for power units in the team’s pre-weekend notes, citing the high altitude and the long full-throttle stadium section as particular stresses, though few would have anticipated the situation unravelling quite so quickly. The failure left Alonso with nothing from a weekend that had briefly hinted at a competitive showing, and it continues a frustrating run of results for the Spaniard and Aston Martin as the 2025 season draws toward its close. With Honda supplying the team’s power units, the reliability question will now sit uncomfortably ahead of the remaining rounds, particularly as Aston Martin are still chasing points in the constructors’ standings. Alonso himself will be keen to put Mexico behind him quickly.