Fernando Alonso isn’t asking for fate to pick a side anymore. As Baku’s walls loom, the Aston Martin driver says the universe has treated him exactly even — half fortune, half frustration — across a career that now stretches beyond 400 starts.
It didn’t feel that way at Monza. Two weeks ago, an errant stone struck Alonso’s right-front suspension early in the race. Dozens of laps later, the part finally gave up as he skimmed the kerb on exit of Ascari. He’d been running eighth. Then he was nothing. A freak failure, and a points finish gone.
“I knew it wasn’t the kerb,” Alonso said in the paddock before the Azerbaijan Grand Prix. “It was just a suspension failure. If it wasn’t production or quality control, then it’s bad luck — a small stone hits a part that wasn’t strong enough. Another bit of bad luck and points lost.”
Aston Martin hasn’t rushed to beef up the suspension arms in response. Alonso knows you can’t armor-plate everything in a Formula 1 car. “You’re always exposed to external objects,” he shrugged. “It’s one in ten million. Let’s hope the next one is in ten million races.”
It wasn’t the only time this year he’s felt the sport roll the dice against him. At Imola, a Virtual Safety Car fell at precisely the wrong moment and tipped him out of a comfortable points haul. In the heat of the moment he called himself “the unluckiest driver in the world.” Later, after a calmer debrief, he dialed it back: the race felt unfair; it wasn’t a cosmic conspiracy.
How does he really tally it all up? “Good luck, bad luck… I think 50/50,” he said. “Across so many races, you have both. It compensates.” He even pointed outside F1 for proof. The second time he won Le Mans, he said, the victory hinged on a late puncture for the leading car and a botched wheel change that forced a second stop. The race flipped. “That was a lot of luck on our side,” he said. Balance restored.
Yet one thing does still jar: the time since his last Grand Prix win. “It’s been more than 10 years,” Alonso admitted, a small edge to his voice. “That doesn’t sound right.”
There’s history behind that feeling. In 2022 at Alpine, Alonso reckons he suffered a dozen DNFs, many of them while running inside the top six. The team’s post-season maths, he said, put the damage around 55–60 points gone begging. This season he estimates 20-plus have already slipped away to reliability or ill-timed moments. It stings more when the car’s quick. “When you’re slow, everything is smooth until the chequered flag,” he quipped. “And you score no points.”
Still, you don’t survive this long in Formula 1 without a hard shell and selective memory. Alonso’s also got reason to be upbeat. Aston Martin’s ceiling is higher than it’s been in years, and next season he’ll finally have something he’s never had: an Adrian Newey-penned car. The designer whose masterpieces have blocked Alonso’s path to titles more than once is set to shape the next Aston Martin. That prospect alone could reset the whole conversation about his “luck.”
For all the romanticism about fate, Baku rarely does subtlety. It’s a thumping, stop-start blast at sea level with a medieval squeeze in the middle and walls that don’t flinch. It rewards the brave and punishes the greedy. Debris on the racing line is part of the calculus. Alonso knows the margins. He also knows he’s still razor sharp at managing them, extracting points from chaos as well as anyone on the grid.
So he’ll take “normal luck,” as he put it — no gifts, no curses, just the standard share. And if the roulette wheel wobbles his way for once? You sense he’s ready to cash in.
