Fernando Alonso at Forty-Five, and Why He Is Still Entering

There is a man at our track who is sixty-one and still enters the Saturday sprint race. He has not won anything in eleven years. He is also, on any given lap, within half a second of people thirty years younger, which is the part that keeps everybody quiet about the subject.

Fernando Alonso is forty-five years old and still on the Formula 1 grid, which makes him the oldest driver out there and the most experienced the sport has ever had. The numbers are in the table below, and the interesting question is not how he got them. It is why he is still collecting them.

Two titles, and then twenty years

The championships came in 2005 and 2006, both with Renault, and at the time the first of them made him the youngest world champion in history at twenty-four. It also ended a run of five straight titles for Michael Schumacher and Ferrari, which is the part people forget.

What happened after that is the strangest career shape in the sport. Twenty years have passed since the second title. McLaren, Ferrari, Alpine and Aston Martin have all had him since then. Second place in the championship came three more times. A third title never did.

Spain in 2013 was the last Grand Prix he won, which puts it thirteen years back. That race was his 201st start. The 239 starts he has made since have produced no win at all.

The years away

He left Formula 1 after 2018, and most drivers who do that at thirty-seven do not come back. Alonso spent the time off winning things.

Le Mans went to him twice with Toyota, in 2018 and in 2019, along with the World Endurance Championship title in the superseason that ran across both those years. Indianapolis did not. He entered the 500 in 2017, in 2019 and again in 2020, and the race remains the missing piece of his Triple Crown.

That combination puts him in rare company. Six drivers have won both the Monaco Grand Prix and the Le Mans 24 Hours, Alonso among them, and Indianapolis is the only thing standing between him and a set nobody but Graham Hill has ever completed.

Why he came back

He returned with Alpine in 2021, moved to Aston Martin for 2023, and that first Aston Martin season produced eight podiums in a car nobody had expected to be quick.

Then it went backwards. The two seasons after that produced no podiums at all, and the 2026 regulations reset, which the team had treated as its opportunity, has so far left the car near the back of the grid.

The honest reading is that he came back for a third title and is unlikely to get one. He has said he will decide his future based on how motivated he is and how quick the car is, which is the same calculation the sixty-one-year-old at our track makes every February.

What forty-five looks like

His team principal has described the age as a strength rather than a problem, and the lap times support that more than they support the usual story about reflexes.

What goes first is not speed. It is tolerance for the rest of it: the travel, the simulator days, the hundredth time somebody asks about retirement, the business of being professionally optimistic about a car that is not working. That is what ends most long careers, and it is a different thing entirely from being slow.

I see the same split at club level. The people who stop are rarely the ones who got slower. They are the ones who ran out of patience for the trailer, the entry fees and the weather.

What his record actually says

Two championships understates him and everybody involved knows it, which is why he comes up in conversations about the best drivers never to have won more. Three second places in the championship, 32 wins, 106 podiums, and more starts than anybody in the history of the sport.

The uncomfortable part is that the same record can be read the other way. Twenty years of being very fast in cars that were not quite good enough is also a description of choices, and he has made some famous ones.

What I take from it is simpler, and it is the thing the man at our track would recognize. He is still entering. Whatever the car is doing, whatever the standings say, he shows up on Saturday and drives it as hard as it will go, and at forty-five that is not stubbornness. That is the whole job.

Jake Holloway is a club racer, track-day instructor, and motorsports editor based near Charlotte, North Carolina. He has raced karts, Legends cars, Spec Miatas, and amateur endurance cars, and he writes for GreenyCars about how racing actually works, from the rule book to the pit lane.