Alonso’s furious Aston Martin rant: “You forgot about me”

Zandvoort had promised much for Fernando Alonso. Fourth in first practice, second in the next, and still tenth in FP3 – always among the closest pursuers of the dominant McLarens at the 2025 Dutch Grand Prix. It looked very much like his best result of the season so far – fifth in Budapest – was once again within reach.

But on Sunday, he crossed the line only eighth, 2.2 seconds behind his teammate Lance Stroll, who had managed to crash twice during practice. A frustrating outcome for the Spanish veteran, who had been dreaming bigger as late as Friday night.

“I had very good pace all weekend, in the race I think I was quite a bit faster than some of the cars in front,” Alonso summed up. “We finished behind a Williams, who struggled a bit this weekend, behind a Haas that was very slow, which didn’t even make it out of Q1, and behind my teammate who started last and still finished ahead of me.”

For Aston Martin, Zandvoort was statistically their second-best weekend of the season with ten points, behind only Budapest with sixteen. Hardly a disaster. But Alonso was furious, convinced much more had been possible: “We must have done something really different with my strategy to finish so badly.”

Part of the damage, though, was self-inflicted. Alonso got away decently enough, entering Turn 1 in tenth place, but in the banked Turn 3 he was passed inside by Andrea Kimi Antonelli and outside by Carlos Sainz, before a snap of oversteer allowed Yuki Tsunoda through as well. By the end of lap one, he was down to 13th.

From there, he was stuck in a DRS train, with overtaking virtually impossible around Zandvoort’s twisty ribbon of corners. Stroll, down in 18th, was the first Aston Martin to pit on lap 8. He rejoined last, but crucially with fifteen seconds of clean air ahead – giving the pit wall a clear picture of the car’s true potential.

Stroll began his second stint with a 1:15.2 lap, 1.6 seconds quicker than Alonso, bottled up in traffic. Within ten laps, the Canadian had halved the gap from 22.2 to 10.8 seconds. The undercut was working.

Aston Martin eventually reacted and brought Alonso in earlier than many rivals. He immediately fired in a 1:15.0, briefly the fastest man on track – quicker even than Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris up front.

But then Lewis Hamilton crashed at Hugenholtz, the Safety Car was deployed, and those yet to stop got their pit stop at half price. Alonso was livid: “The truth is that every time we stopped in the following laps there was a safety car and the others stopped for free and we were never lucky enough to take advantage of the two hard tyres,” he fumed.

On the radio he swore: “F***ing luck we have, always. S**t. […] Ah, f***ing end of the race. F***ing lucky.” Later, he snapped even harder at his engineer: “Think about the strategy. You forgot about me in the first half of the race. Maybe you remember I’m here in the second half.”

It was hard not to hear a dig at the fact that his teammate – the team owner’s son – seemed to get the better end of strategy while Alonso did not. His temper flared repeatedly. When his engineer simply asked about the balance, Alonso erupted: “I don’t f***ing know. You put me always in f***ing traffic, I don’t know.”

That he still salvaged eighth he called “a minor miracle and we probably didn’t deserve the points today. I think on the first stop, I’m not sure it was the best thing where we pitted and the strategy we opted for.”

“And in the second, I was just worried that we would just stay behind for the whole race and do the same as the others and I felt that the car had more pace, so I wanted to do something different than the others and try to overtake them.”

“We overtook at the end one Red Bull and one Haas and the other Haas finished in front of us. So, yeah, they were lucky a little bit with the last safety car and we were lucky also with the retirements and the penalty of Kimi. If not, we were not in the points, so we need to be aware of that.”

By his reckoning, fifth place would have been on the cards: “Albon, he finished P5 or P6, so I think that P5 was very possible with our pace today. I think we’ve been significantly faster than some of the cars that finished in front of us, like the Williams and the Haases.” That included Stroll, whom Alonso at one stage waved through without a fight due to a tyre offset.

Lance Stroll, Aston Martin Racing, Fernando Alonso, Aston Martin Racing, Franco Colapinto, Alpine

Photo by: Andy Hone/ LAT Images via Getty Images

After the race, team principal Mike Krack once again had the unenviable job of contextualising his star driver’s outbursts: “He was angry with the race, he was angry with the world, he was angry with us, he is angry with everybody,” the Luxembourger shrugged. “Nothing we can do in these situations, we have to take it as it is.”

That the podium Alonso had eyed on Friday ended up so far away, Krack insisted, was not lost on Sunday: “You need to qualify in the front, you see with Isack he qualified in the front, and at the end of the day with McLaren a problem, then you finish on the podium.”

Compounding the strategic missteps was a performance issue. Stroll’s practice crashes meant the engineers lacked vital long-run data, so they couldn’t set the floor plank as aggressively low as they might have. And in Formula 1, the rule of thumb is simple: the lower the car, the faster it is.

“You have to be legal after the race, so, you know, you can only wear 1mm in total,” Krack explained. “We didn’t do a lot of laps on Friday, Lance had the accident and Fernando did not do many long-run laps, so you are a little bit in unknown territory when it comes to the wear, so you have to take a bit more conservative approach. We had to do that and that is costing a bit of performance.”