Aston Martin arrived in Monaco this week with an unusual item high on its priority list: making sure Fernando Alonso can actually sit comfortably in his own car.
After being forced out of the Canadian Grand Prix last month when pain from the seat in his AMR26 became too much, the team has spent the days leading into Monte Carlo making a series of cockpit adjustments designed to stop the problem escalating again. Alonso climbed out in Canada after 23 of 68 laps, later admitting he’d felt “more and more uncomfortable” as the race wore on — and Aston Martin’s chief trackside officer Mike Krack conceding the discomfort hadn’t come out of nowhere.
Alonso has played through physical issues before, of course. Aston Martin sat him out of opening practice at last year’s Hungarian Grand Prix with what the team described as a muscular injury in his back. But Canada was a more brutal reminder of how small ergonomic compromises can become non-negotiable in the modern car — and how quickly they can derail a weekend.
Krack, speaking on Thursday ahead of track action in Monaco, said the team has already made changes but doesn’t expect this to be a one-and-done fix.
“We were here from Tuesday morning with Fernando,” Krack explained. “He lives around the corner here, so a lot of work went into it on Tuesday with a lot of variations. Now, the driving is the real test.
“You see it statically, it’s not always the same, but I think we made this really small step in the right direction. He was mildly confident that this is going to be an improvement, but I would not be surprised if we have to do another tweak over the sessions to get him really comfortable.”
That last line matters, because Monaco isn’t the place to discover you’re still fighting the car. It’s physically demanding in its own way — constant steering input, relentless bumps, no straights to reset — and if Alonso’s still shifting around trying to relieve pressure, the lap time will bleed away long before the pain becomes visible to everyone else.
Krack also made it clear this wasn’t simply a case of changing an angle and calling it done. F1 cockpits are interlinked systems: move the driver and you cascade into controls, reach, compliance and regulation.
“You cannot just change one thing because then you need to change the paddles, you need to check the regular regulation height, the steering wheel distance, all these kind of things,” he said. “So it’s never one single thing, it’s a complete set of changes and that makes it a bit complicated.”
It’s a neat window into the realities behind what can look, from the outside, like a straightforward comfort tweak. Even if a driver’s request is as simple as “I need to sit a touch differently”, the consequences can pull you into a wider set of trade-offs — not least because of FIA restrictions on seating height. There’s only so much freedom to move a driver around before you run into the rulebook, and Monaco’s compact schedule doesn’t offer the luxury of long test days to iterate.
Asked whether the net result is Alonso sitting higher in the cockpit, Krack couldn’t resist a dry response. Alonso, he noted, is 1.71 metres tall — and Krack joked: “He can’t be much lower!”
Still, there’s nothing funny about the competitive knock-on if this drags on. Alonso’s race in Canada didn’t unravel because of a slow pitstop or a marginal strategy call; he simply couldn’t continue. In a season where small swings in form can decide whether a team leaves a weekend with points or regrets, losing a car to cockpit pain is as avoidable as it is costly.
The other subplot in Aston Martin’s Monaco build-up is the return of Adrian Newey to the paddock. Krack has confirmed the team principal will be back on-site this weekend after missing every race since the season-opening Australian Grand Prix in March. Reports last month suggested Newey had spent time in hospital due to illness, and his absence has been conspicuous given how closely his presence is watched whenever Aston Martin rolls into a high-profile event.
PlanetF1.com understands Newey arrived in Monte Carlo on Wednesday evening, returning to a venue where he made his first trackside appearance with Aston Martin at this race in 2025.
For Alonso, though, the immediate concern is more basic than any wider organisational story. Monaco tends to expose every weakness — mechanical, operational, personal — because there’s nowhere to hide and no margin for error. If Aston Martin’s “small step” proves to be enough, Alonso can get back to doing what he does best around these streets. If not, Krack has already prepared everyone for the likelihood that this will be a rolling fix across practice.
Friday, in other words, isn’t just about finding lap time. It’s about finding a seat that lets Alonso stay in the fight.
