Fernando Alonso has spent two decades in Formula 1 learning how to live with risk: to flirt with it when it buys lap time, to manage it when it doesn’t. Which is why one of the more surreal Alonso stories doing the rounds again in the paddock this week feels oddly fitting — not because it’s plausible, but because it says something about how the outside world still sees him.
Back in 2011, as Spain prepared for Pope Benedict XVI’s visit for World Youth Day, organisers apparently floated a headline-grabbing idea: put Alonso in the driver’s seat of the Popemobile.
Yago de la Cierva, now coordinating Pope Leo XIV’s upcoming trip to Spain in June, explained that the plan didn’t even get close to reality once the security machine got involved.
“In 2011, for example, we had a meeting with 200 authorities in the field of security, we wanted the Popemobile to be driven by Fernando Alonso and they shouted to the skies,” de la Cierva said at a press conference. “They were furious. They told us: absolutely not!”
The punchline, inevitably, is that de la Cierva tried to talk them down with the kind of logic that makes perfect sense until you remember what job Alonso does for a living.
“I told them that Fernando probably knew how to drive a car. The Pope wouldn’t be in danger,” he said. “They told me it had to be a police officer driving the car.”
It’s an anecdote that works because it captures the Alonso paradox. In the cockpit, he’s a control freak — precise, calculating, relentless about detail. From the outside, he’s still the swashbuckling speed merchant, the guy you absolutely do not hand the keys to when the situation demands ceremony, predictability and, above all, not being Fernando Alonso.
If anything, the story lands differently now because Alonso is living at the opposite end of the emotional spectrum in 2026: not the thrill of being trusted with something iconic, but the grind of dragging an uncooperative Aston Martin through a season that has too often been about damage limitation rather than opportunity.
Aston Martin’s year has been defined by persistent issues and a baseline of performance that has left both Alonso and the team looking over their shoulders. Speaking during the Japanese Grand Prix weekend, Alonso struck a tone that will sound familiar to anyone who’s heard him in the leaner phases of his career — realistic bordering on blunt, but still angling for a way through.
“We have been running without too many issues for the last two weekends,” he said. “Obviously, in terms of performance, we are at the back. So, yeah, you don’t find any satisfaction when you are not competitive.”
That line is Alonso in a nutshell: he’ll tolerate plenty if the stopwatch rewards it, but there’s no romance in simply circulating. The interesting bit, though, is where he goes next — because there’s a subtle leadership to the way he frames Aston Martin’s situation. It’s not finger-pointing, it’s not theatrics. It’s the veteran’s version of keeping the room calm.
“We try to stay together, to stay strong, and give time to both factories to fix the situation,” Alonso added. “They are working flat out. There are a couple of improvements, a couple of ideas.”
The “both factories” reference matters, because it hints at a modern F1 reality teams rarely spell out cleanly: when your performance problem isn’t a single broken part but a system-level shortfall, solutions don’t arrive with a new front wing on Friday morning. They arrive after weeks of correlation work, manufacturing lead times, rethinking approaches — and doing it while racing every other weekend.
Alonso also reached for an example that will resonate in every technical meeting up and down the grid: McLaren’s 2023 turnaround, when the team began the year rooted near the back and ended it fighting at the front. Alonso knows full well how dangerous those comparisons can be — different regulations, different resources, different problems — yet he used it anyway, carefully.
“We saw the McLaren in 2023. They were last in the first couple of races, and they eventually were at the front at the end of the year,” he said. “Maybe that’s too optimistic. That’s a dream scenario.”
There’s an honesty in that caveat that you don’t always get from drivers trying to protect morale. But he didn’t stop at the disclaimer. Alonso’s point was broader: a season is long enough for competence and clarity to be rewarded, if you diagnose the issue correctly and act quickly enough.
“In a way, we know that the season is long, and if you understand the problems and you fix them, you have plenty of time to do the second part of the year or the last third of the championship in a much better position,” he said. “That’s what we are working on now.”
It’s a very Alonso way to pitch hope: not as faith, but as process. Identify. Fix. Execute. Repeat.
And that, perhaps, is the thread connecting the Popemobile near-miss to his present-day Aston Martin reality. The Vatican’s security chiefs didn’t want charisma; they wanted predictability. Aston Martin right now is trying to engineer exactly that: a car whose behaviour can be trusted, whose weaknesses can be traced, and whose development direction doesn’t change with every data run.
Alonso never got to chauffeur the Pope — and judging by the reaction in that 2011 security meeting, he was never remotely close. But the punchline in 2026 is that he’d probably settle for driving something far less symbolic and far more valuable to him: an Aston Martin that simply does what he asks, every lap, without argument.
