Aston Martin’s Fernando Alonso has downplayed talk from McLaren’s Lando Norris suggesting that some midfield Formula 1 teams could challenge for race wins.
Last season, four teams took victories, with McLaren, Ferrari, Red Bull and Mercedes as a quartet finishing well clear of the rest in the Constructors’ Championship.
However, convergence under the current regulations, which enter their final year in 2025, has been profound, and this was proven during the Abu Dhabi season finale when eight-tenths covered the 20 cars in the first stint of qualifying.
With that in mind, Norris claimed ahead of the F1 75 launch event that “you’re probably going to have some winners that aren’t McLaren, Ferrari, Mercedes, or Red Bull”.
That notion was put to Alonso during F1 pre-season testing at the Bahrain International Circuit last week, but he claimed it would be “difficult” for Aston Martin or any of its midfield challengers to fight for a victory.
“Now that [Norris] has the winning car, he says that,” Alonso told select media including Motorsport Week.
“When he was in the fifth or sixth team, he was saying that only one team will win all the races.
“So, this is a normal, confident speech, you know. So, it’s good for him, but I think it’s going to be difficult.
“Reliability is so good these days, there are not many retirements, there are not many incidents, strategies are quite defined.
“Even on Thursday before coming to the Grand Prix, you know exactly it’s going to be one stop, two stops, which tyre you will use.
“So, everything is so perfect now that it’s difficult to change or to make a race unpredictable.
“It has to be crazy weather or something like that.
“You know, hopefully there are multiple winners and it’s going to be a tight championship.
“Last year it was already a very good one and hopefully this year it’s even better.”
Alonso doesn’t predict big pecking order changes
Aston Martin, although unlikely to be troubling the top four teams as Alonso mentioned, is going to be embroiled in a tough midfield battle this season.
After starting 2024 on the heels of the top four, the Silverstone-based squad fell into the clutches of the midfield as its development progress hit snag after snag.
Asked to predict where Aston Martin lies in the pecking order after testing, Alonso was unsure, expecting little to have changed after the season-finale in Abu Dhabi last year.
“I have no prediction,” he said.
“I didn’t follow the test. I know that [Williams’] Carlos [Sainz] was the fastest [Thursday] because I read all the Spanish news.
“Apart from that, I don’t know even today who is first and who is second.
“I think they are all in a different programme. I know McLaren did a good long run [Thursday] and Carlos was first.
“All the rest of the teams, all the days and the teams and info, I’m not aware [of].
“I guess it’s difficult to believe that things will change so much compared to Abu Dhabi. Let’s put it that way.
“The first four races, I think that things will look similar to Abu Dhabi.”
That means Aston Martin could find itself fighting three to four outfits for those crucial spots left in the top-10 after the top four teams have settled their order.
While Alonso has seen some progress from the AMR25, he admitted that Aston Martin will need to execute “perfect” weekends to pick up points.
“I think we have some positives in the car,” he said.
“We’re not going into the details but obviously the data and the correlation seems good and there is a step forward compared to last year’s car.
“So, we are relatively happy knowing that it’s extremely tight in the midfield and we will have to do perfect weekends if we want to score points.
“But this maybe was not a surprise and we will try to get better throughout the season.”
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