Alonso seethes as Hamilton crawls Ferrari home in Singapore — Cowell channels Lauda: “Give ’em a**holes”
Under the glare of Marina Bay’s floodlights, Fernando Alonso smelled blood. Up ahead, Lewis Hamilton was nursing a Ferrari with failing brakes, skipping over white lines one corner at a time, and trying to drag the SF-25 across the line. It was all Alonso needed to see. He lit up the radio, went hunting, and made it personal.
“I cannot f***ing believe it,” Alonso raged in the closing laps as he reeled Hamilton in. “For me, you cannot drive when the car is not safe, you know. Sometimes they try to disqualify me with no mirror, and now you have no brakes, and everything is fine? I doubt it.”
Hamilton, who had radioed that he’d “lost my brakes, lost my left front,” backed off but didn’t stop leaning on the track limits as he tried to survive to the flag. Alonso arrived on his gearbox with a lap to go, crossed the line four tenths behind, and then got the place anyway. The FIA slapped Hamilton with a five-second penalty for repeated track limits violations, lifting Alonso to seventh.
It was one of those scruffy, strangely gripping late-race duels that only Singapore seems to produce — a street fight at 30 km/h slower than race pace, but twice as tense. One car wounded, one circling, both drivers still razor-sharp.
Afterward, Aston Martin’s Andy Cowell offered a view that walked the line between pride and pragmatism. He’d been counting Alonso through those final sectors, watching the Ferrari’s alarms and the delta shrink.
“At the point we saw that Lewis had a problem, it was give it everything,” Cowell said. “Niki Lauda used to have a phrase for that. We were counting it down for Fernando, who was pushing hard. Lewis showed his competitiveness to bring the car home. And I think the penalty is about the right sort of magnitude, isn’t it? It was flashing up — several track limit alerts — so the FIA were already on to it.”
That Lauda line wasn’t random, either. Earlier this year, Hamilton recalled the Austrian’s favorite, slightly baffling instruction from their Mercedes days. “You would say give him hell, but he would always say the word a**holes,” Hamilton laughed. “At the beginning I never understood. And he’s like, no, give ’em a**holes.”
In Singapore, Aston Martin leaned straight into that ethos. Alonso emptied the tank. The green car never needed a dive-bomb; pressure alone did the job. For Hamilton, it was about survival. Brake issues around this venue aren’t exactly unheard of, and when they hit late, they’re brutal: it’s a constant stop-start circuit with almost no airflow to cool anything. The calculus shifts from pace to preservation, and even the seven-time champion wound up straying beyond the lines too often for the stewards’ taste.
Alonso’s ire over safety will linger. He’s been consistent — and loud — on the difference between “pushing the rules” and “pushing your luck,” particularly when the latter involves impaired visibility or compromised hardware. His comparison to mirror infractions was pointed. The counter-argument: the systems and the officials were already on Hamilton’s case, and the car was still controllable enough to stay in the fight. The penalty did what penalties are supposed to do: correct the outcome without rewriting the race.
This wasn’t a podium scrap, but it was a character study. Hamilton’s night could’ve ended nose-first in a TecPro; instead, he managed the problem, made mistakes, took his medicine, and still saw the flag. Alonso, meanwhile, smelled opportunity and forced it without stepping over the line himself. You don’t get many laps like that in a season — most of the time, the script is written once strategy plays out. Here, it wasn’t.
And for Cowell, whose team left Singapore with a tidy points haul, the takeaway was simple: when there’s blood in the water, you attack — Lauda-style. When there isn’t, you still try.
Alonso got the place. Hamilton got the reprimand. Both, in their own way, showed why you can never look away in the last five laps at Marina Bay.
