Jean Alesi came to Monaco this weekend for the kind of indulgent, crowd-pleasing nostalgia that the Historic Grand Prix does better than anyone. Instead, he’s leaving with the sort of double gut-punch that makes you wonder why anyone ever agrees to hustle a priceless old Formula 1 car between Armco and unforgiving kerbs in the first place.
Alesi didn’t make the start of Sunday’s Series D race after his Ferrari 312 developed a technical problem on the way to the grid. It was a flat ending to a weekend that had already turned awkward on Friday when he binned the same car at the Nouvelle Chicane.
The crash itself was as old-school as the machinery: a moment under braking, the car not quite doing what the driver expected, and then the inevitable slide into the inside barrier. The 1969-spec 312 went in nose-first on the approach to the left-right, and while Alesi climbed out unhurt, the image was a reminder that these cars don’t flatter you and Monaco doesn’t forgive you — not even on a “fun” weekend.
Methusalem Racing’s crew did what Monaco crews always do in these situations: worked late, fixed what could be fixed, and got the car back out. Alesi returned to the track on Saturday and, in a brief post afterwards, thanked the team and promised: “See you tomorrow.” It read like a man trying to turn the page and salvage something from the weekend.
But Sunday had other ideas. The Ferrari then hit a separate technical snag before the race, and that was that — no grid spot, no start, no chance to put the story right on track.
Alesi wasn’t alone in watching the Series D start without taking part. This is the class for three-litre F1 cars from the 1966–72 era — spectacular, loud, and just unpredictable enough to make the whole thing feel alive — and a handful of drivers were caught out by issues before the field got away. At the front, Michael Lyons led the pack off pole in a Surtees TS9, while Alesi could only look on from the sidelines.
There’s a specific kind of sting to a DNS in historic racing. A crash is at least a moment — a flashpoint you can explain away as a misjudgement, cold tyres, old brakes, whatever story helps you sleep that night. A mechanical failure is simply the car deciding it’s done with you. In Alesi’s case, it also meant a weekend that started with a high-profile error ended without even the chance of a clean run to restore some pride.
Still, it’s hard to be too sanctimonious about an ex-Ferrari driver having a scrappy time in Monaco, because it’s practically a tradition. The principality has a habit of embarrassing even the famous names when they climb into iconic cars with iconic expectations attached.
Charles Leclerc learned that the hard way at the 2022 Historic Monaco Grand Prix when he crashed at Rascasse driving Niki Lauda’s 1974-spec machine — an incident that arrived only weeks before he endured another typically bruising chapter in his complicated relationship with the modern Monaco Grand Prix. Leclerc eventually did get his fairytale, winning at home for the first time in 2024, but the underlying point stands: Monaco doesn’t care who you are, and the car doesn’t care what your CV says.
Alesi, 61 now and still a magnetic figure around anything red and noisy, knows all of that better than most. He made 201 F1 starts between 1989 and 2001, and his five seasons at Ferrari from 1991 to 1995 made him a central character in an era when the team’s relationship with victory was far more intermittent than it wanted to admit. The Historic Monaco weekend is supposed to be a softer version of the same theatre — the glamour, the closeness, the sound — without the sharp edge.
Except the sharp edge never really goes away in Monte Carlo. Not when you’re braking a vintage F1 car into the Nouvelle Chicane, and not when you’re trying to make the grid with a temperamental piece of machinery that has its own ideas about whether today is a “yes” or a “no”.
For Alesi, this one will feel needlessly frustrating: repaired after a very public crash, only to be stopped by a different problem at the final moment. For everyone watching, it was a reminder of why the Historic Monaco Grand Prix still matters. It isn’t a parade. It’s Monaco — just with older cars and, sometimes, even less mercy.
