Alonso snarls through Singapore: radio ultimatum, botched stop, P7 salvaged
If there’s one place that amplifies a driver’s mood, it’s Marina Bay. It’s hot, it’s tight, it’s relentless – perfect conditions for Fernando Alonso to deliver another slice of radio theatre while quietly rescuing Aston Martin’s weekend from a 9.2-second pit stop.
The tone was set early. Alonso lost out to Racing Bulls rookie Isack Hadjar at the start, gained it back, then saw the race flip when Aston Martin called him in for a routine one-stopper from softs to mediums. Routine, except for the part where he sat parked long enough to scroll a couple of podcasts. A 9.2 is a momentum killer at any track; in Singapore, it’s a sledgehammer.
From there, Alonso had a recovery drive to orchestrate – and a message to deliver. “34 to go,” came race engineer Andrew Vizard, doing the right thing by keeping the driver looped in. Alonso’s reply was pure, distilled Fernando: “If you speak to me every lap, I will disconnect the radio.”
That’s not irritation; that’s a veteran drawing the line. The Kimi Raikkonen school of “let me get on with it” graduated another honours student.
He did, of course, get on with it. Alonso sliced back into the points, re-passed Hadjar and couldn’t resist a little needle over comms, sarcastically awarding the youngster a “trophy for hero of the race.” The context? Hadjar was nursing engine issues and, by his own team’s reckoning, dropping up to four tenths a lap. Alonso felt the defence was needless brinkmanship that cost them both time.
“Sometimes, you need to know when it’s better to fight and when it’s not,” Alonso said afterwards. “We probably both lose, but for him in particular.” It was classic Alonso: part warning shot, part lecture. Hadjar shrugged it off with a jab of his own, saying the two-time champion was “really grumpy.” Welcome to F1; elbows up, feelings optional.
There was another subplot with Lewis Hamilton. The Ferrari man initially beat Alonso to seventh on the road as brake problems snowballed, but it unraveled with multiple track limits violations. The stewards handed Hamilton a five-second penalty that dropped him behind, leaving Alonso as the one collecting the six points for P7. Before all that was settled, the Aston Martin pit wall got both barrels as Alonso – watching Hamilton skate wide repeatedly – fumed: “I cannot f***ing believe it. Is it safe to drive with no brakes?”
If the radio was spiky, the driving wasn’t. It was measured, efficient, the sort of tidy, attritional Singapore execution Alonso has built a career on. The stop cost him the chance to aim higher, but he protected the comeback, beat the cars he needed to beat, and kept Aston Martin’s scrap for fifth in the Constructors’ rolling into the next round with minimal damage.
There are takeaways here for everyone. Aston Martin can’t afford nine-second pit stops when their Sundays are already hanging on fine margins. The AMR25 has pace to fight at the edges of the top six; it needs pit crew sharpness to match. Vizard and Alonso, by now a knowingly combustible pairing when the heat’s up, will chalk it up as another day in the office. If anything, the blunt boundary-setting from the cockpit probably saved them five laps of counterproductive chatter.
As for Alonso versus Hadjar, chalk it up as a generational moment. One driver racing with the big-picture calculator he keeps in his helmet; another trying to seize it on instinct, even while compromised. Both approaches have a place in Singapore. Only one tends to survive it.
In the end, Alonso left with six points, a handful of quotes destined for end-of-year montages, and a reminder that if you hand him a recovery mission, he’ll usually bring it home. The radio can stay connected. He said his piece. The driving did the rest.
