Fernando Alonso doesn’t mind rumours. He minds what they turn into when a team is struggling.
Ahead of this weekend’s Austrian Grand Prix, the Aston Martin driver pushed back hard at the tone of the online conversation around the Silverstone outfit, describing some of what’s being posted as “borderline… abuse” as the squad grinds through a rough opening phase of its Honda partnership.
Alonso has been left carrying a familiar kind of load: fronting up every Thursday, putting on the brave face, and then climbing into a car that simply hasn’t been in the fight. Aston Martin has just one point on the board so far in 2026 — and it’s Alonso’s. Their best finish of the year remains his P10 in Monaco.
That backdrop is exactly why the paddock gossip cycle has spun up again, with Alonso linked to a return to Enstone for a fourth stint with the team now branded Alpine. It’s an easy narrative to write: the two-time world champion won both titles there when it was Renault; he’s at the stage of his career where every contract line gets read twice; and his manager is Flavio Briatore, Alpine’s executive advisor and de facto team boss.
Alonso’s answer, though, wasn’t to fuel it. It was to shield his current team.
“There are always rumours,” Alonso said. “We’ve been very badly treated by the outside world, and it’s normal. We are underperforming, we are in a bad moment, and when the summer break comes, there are always rumours. There are rumours in the top teams, there are rumours also in our case, because we are underperforming.”
The sharpest part of his response wasn’t aimed at rival teams or even at the usual speculation merchants. It was aimed at the way a modern F1 slump gets consumed — as content, as a punchline, as something disposable.
“We are an easy target because we are at the back, and there is all this social media and all these things and jokes that you can put on ourselves,” Alonso said. “Probably that’s borderline to be abuse in social media.”
It’s an unusually direct framing from a driver who’s seen enough of Formula 1’s cycles to know how quickly pity turns to mockery, and how little room there is for nuance once the results sheet does the talking. But it also sounded like a defence of the people behind the scenes, particularly with Aston Martin’s new era under a spotlight: Adrian Newey on board, Honda in place, big promises made, and early returns that have been, bluntly, ugly.
Alonso was keen to underline that, internally, the team hasn’t been flailing — it’s been waiting. Aston Martin made a call early in the season to resist the temptation of small, frequent upgrades and instead focus resources on a larger package due later in the year, with Newey’s influence part of the wider direction. In a cost-capped world, that choice is both rational and brutal: you don’t get credit for discipline when you’re slow, you just get lapped in the narrative.
“But our team and our leaders, they took the decision in Australia to wait until it was worth making an upgrade package for cost efficiency and things like that, and we all agree on that, and we are all waiting on that, and we wait in the best manner possible,” Alonso said.
There was a notable insistence, too, that Aston Martin isn’t a short-term fling for him — not even close. Even while he acknowledged the team started “on the back foot” with the new Honda relationship, Alonso stressed his commitment goes beyond whatever years he has left actually driving.
“My commitment with Aston Martin is beyond my driving time, and I believe in this project,” he said. “We have the right people. We have obviously the best of the best with Adrian Newey. We have Honda.
“We started on the back foot, yes, we understand that, but we are trying to put things in place as soon as possible.”
Then came the line Aston Martin will want clipped, saved, and replayed internally when the next set of rumours lands.
“The problems will be fixed. It’s a matter of time,” Alonso said. “I believe in the project. I trust my team, and we are all in this together.”
That’s not the language of a driver half-packed for a move. It’s the language of someone asking the outside world to recognise the human cost of being uncompetitive — and the odd cruelty of watching a thousand people’s work reduced to memes when the car doesn’t respond.
“We are not happy with our position, but we are hard workers, and Honda are hard workers,” Alonso added. “Aston Martin, we are 1000 people of hard workers that they go Monday to Sunday to work eight hours to fix our problems.”
Whether that promised turnaround arrives in time to change Aston Martin’s season is one thing. Whether it arrives in time to change the temperature around the project is another. For now, Alonso has drawn a clear line: the results are fair game, but the dehumanising noise that follows them isn’t.
