Despite having aimed to fight for wins and titles by now, Aston Martin are nowhere near the front of the field in 2025. In fact, their form has worsened with each passing year, and their start to the new campaign has been nothing short of abysmal. Now, imagine what Fernando Alonso might be thinking as the Spaniard had bet on Aston’s potential to become a top team.
Alonso has been pushing hard at the Silverstone outfit to chase race wins and podiums again while dreaming about fighting for that elusive third world title he has coveted for 19 long years. However, with the AMR25 being one of the slowest cars on the 2025 grid, Alonso hasn’t scored a single point so far in four rounds of the season.
At last weekend’s Bahrain GP as well, he finished only 15th after experiencing several issues, including his steering wheel coming off in FP2. This added to the crashes and technical failures the #14 driver has had in the initial three weekends. It is undoubtedly one of his worst starts to an F1 campaign and is also giving flashbacks of his torrid time with McLaren-Honda from 2015 to 2017.
RacingNews365 journalists Ian Parkes, Nick Golding, and Sam Coop shed light on the fact that 2017 was the last time Alonso failed to score points in the opening four races of the season. This is certainly not a statistic the Spaniard would want to hear about, especially due to the horrifying memories of that McLaren-Honda operation that fell flat on its face.
“GP2 engine, GP2”, was Alonso’s famous radio quote during that three-year stint at the Woking-based team, who had onboarded Honda to re-establish their iconic partnership that dominated F1 in the late ’80s and early ’90s. However, Honda’s initial V6 turbo-hybrid engine was a disaster with reliability issues and a lack of power, as Alonso experienced firsthand.
“GP2 Engine” – Fernando Alonso
Japan – 2015#F1 pic.twitter.com/ep7ydbrLSV
— F1 History (@TodayF1History) April 6, 2024
2017 was a terrible season for the #14 driver as he finished only 15th in the championship standings with 17 points. Not the points haul that a two-time world champion would’ve expected.
But it wasn’t completely shocking, as that was Honda’s third year—which turned out to be their final year—with McLaren, and Alonso had experienced a similar season in 2015. 11 points and a P17 finish in the drivers’ standings—nothing more needs to be said about how Alonso would’ve felt!
Fernando Alonso has only failed to score points in the first 3 GPs in 5 different seasons
2001 (Minardi)
2015-2016-2017 (McLaren-Honda)
2025 (Aston Martin) pic.twitter.com/skBlaHIApg— Holiness (@F1BigData) April 9, 2025
Eventually, though, the Spaniard left McLaren and F1 after 2018 as their change to Renault power also did not yield any significant improvement in their on-track fortunes. Back then, Alonso was completely consumed with the frustration and lack of success he had endured for 12 seasons since his last title triumph.
Cut to 2025, he isn’t showing that sort of frustration amid Aston Martin’s struggles. The 43-year-old knows he needs to show patience as the Silverstone outfit have onboarded technical talents like Adrian Newey and Andy Cowell, who are more than capable of overturning Aston’s performances in the new era of regulations that begin in 2026.
Alonso is also hoping for the same that Newey and Cowell’s championship-winning expertise helps him get back into the fight at the front of the field. That is why he also understands that Newey won’t be intervening in the 2025 car‘s development, despite it being in a dire state performance-wise.
