Fernando Alonso notoriously dislikes Formula 1’s new-for-2026 machinery, and he made this abundantly clear following Friday practice at the Monaco Grand Prix.
Alonso has been among the biggest critics of F1’s new rules ever since he first tested Aston Martin’s latest car, lamenting that high-speed corners no longer are a challenge as drivers lift due to energy management requirements.
Monaco happens to be the one place where there is no need to save energy, which doesn’t mean drivers are free from management constraints, as a frustrated Alonso pointed out.
“This is probably the worst generation of cars I ever drove in Monaco,” he lamented.
“The way you charge the battery, with the braking and lifting off and things like that, obviously creates a lot of inconsistency into the engine braking of the car. Sometimes you have less, sometimes you have push and sometimes not.
“If the battery is completely full, then you don’t recharge because the battery is full. So you don’t have engine braking. It’s like pushing.
“It’s just the rules. Hybrid cars should not be racing. It’s as simple as that.”
Fernando Alonso, Aston Martin Racing
Photo by: Sam Bloxham / LAT Images via Getty Images
Alonso’s distaste for 2026 cars is compounded by the AMR26’s specific woes. The Spaniard has been complaining about “random downshifts” and was caught out again in Free Practice 1, losing control on the approach to the chicane and tapping the wall.
“Now, we harvest a lot during braking,” he explained. “The rear axle is just charging the battery massively on the braking. And then you have these downshifts that you need to interact with the engine blip to engage the next gear. There are a lot of things going on this year and it seems that we are not at the level yet.”
On top of the driveability issues that make the car “way too inconsistent”, Alonso said Aston Martin was suffering from “chronic understeer” despite some set-up tweaks and would need further experiments to potentially solve the situation.
Hence Aston’s worrying deficit on the timesheet at the end of Friday practice – Cadillac was 0.178s faster, and the next closest team, Racing Bulls, enjoyed a 0.546s margin on the shortest track of the season.
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– The Autosport.com Team
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