‘There’s a spirit in the car’: Alonso jokes about haunted AMR25 after Qatar, as Aston Martin weighs in on McLaren’s gamble
Fernando Alonso left Losail with points, a shrug, and a spooky punchline. After a strange sequence of moments across the Qatar weekend — an odd gravel excursion on Saturday and a self-inflicted spin in Sunday’s Grand Prix — the Aston Martin driver suggested there might be “something paranormal” going on inside his AMR25.
He still hauled P7 to keep Aston Martin’s push for sixth in the Constructors’ alive, but the spin at Turn 10 was the kind that leaves even a two-time World Champion blinking at the dash.
“I was taking it easy, the truth is that I wasn’t pushing 100 per cent, but this car has disconnections, I don’t know what to call them, a bit paranormal, there’s a spirit inside the car,” Alonso said. “Yesterday, I suddenly lost the front end for three or four corners… as if I had no front wheels. And today it was the rear wheels, suddenly a lash.”
Alonso’s diagnosis wasn’t entirely tongue-in-cheek. He described an AMR25 living on a razor’s edge. “We’re hypersensitive to the wind, hypersensitive to one or two degrees of temperature, we’re always on a knife edge and today I made that mistake,” he added, relieved the spin didn’t feed him to a train of cars behind.
When Aston Martin’s chief trackside officer Mike Krack was asked about the “haunted car,” he deadpanned: “Next question.”
On strategy, however, Krack had far more to say — especially about McLaren’s roll of the dice that helped swing the race, and perhaps the title, back toward Red Bull.
With a Safety Car on Lap 7, almost the entire field dived in. McLaren left both Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri out. Max Verstappen, who did stop, went on to win, slicing Norris’ championship lead to 12 points heading to the Abu Dhabi finale. With Piastri in the hunt as well, just 16 points cover the trio.
Krack admitted he was “very surprised” McLaren didn’t react. “Because you do all that work. You do all the prep work, and there are these edge cases in terms of Safety Car, in terms of race distance and maximum laps, and the fact that everybody came in except two cars shows you that it was probably a mistake,” he said.
He explained the kind of pre-race scenario planning that informed Aston’s call. “This is our key business. The race is the only place where you can score. So you need to be prepared as much as you can. You cannot just go by feeling, so you try to replay the race and think, how can it pan out? Safety Cars can be early, mid, late. There is the statistics, there is history, and then there is a long list of things that you go through.”
Krack pointed to the unique Qatar variables that make the Lap 7 decision so loaded: the long pit lane, tyre life that looked marginal in the Sprint, and the event’s lap-limit complexity. “If you stop on Lap 7, you have only one stop to do,” he noted. “But we have seen in the Sprint that the tyres were having a hard time on the 19 laps. You try to juggle all these things — the tyres, the Safety Car, the car, the competition, your own pace and degradation — and then you elaborate a picture and try to execute. Planning.”
For Alonso, execution meant managing a car that keeps flirting with the edge. He’s been here before — coaxing speed from a package that doesn’t always give him consistency — but the candour about wind and temperature sensitivity hints at why Aston’s peaks and troughs have felt so pronounced this season. The points in Qatar were still valuable, and he knew it.
The wider story, though, is what that Safety Car moment did to the title fight. Norris remains in front, Verstappen is closing, and Piastri’s still within striking distance. Abu Dhabi will settle it, with all three walking in with real skin in the game and almost no margin for a wrong call. McLaren learned that the hard way on Sunday.
As for Aston Martin, sixth in the standings is still in play. Alonso delivered again, even if he needed a little good fortune — and maybe a friendly exorcist — to keep it tidy. If the AMR25 really does have a ghost, they’ll want it quiet for one more weekend.
And a quick footnote ahead of Yas Marina: Oscar Piastri won’t take part in FP1, with McLaren’s reserve stepping in under the FIA’s rookie running requirement. All the more reason to arrive prepared — and to avoid Lap 7 traps.
