WIDE-EYED, CRAZED, TRIUMPHANT. Fernando Alonso climbed onto the front of his blue and yellow Renault. Pumping his fists into the sky, a high-pitched shriek tore out of his mouth, followed by, “Come on! Come on!”
It created an iconic image at what was a landmark moment in Formula 1: Twenty years ago, on Sept. 25, 2005, Alonso was king of the world. With two whole races to spare, a 24-year-old from Oviedo, Spain had shattered the sport’s status quo. In his duel with McLaren’s Kimi Räikkönen, one familiar name had been missing: Michael Schumacher, whose run of five straight drivers’ titles — and Ferrari’s six straight constructors’ — had come to an abrupt end without so much as a whimper. Third place at Interlagos had been enough for Alonso to clinch it.
Two decades later, he insists it’s that scream — not the trophy, not the parties that night in São Paulo or back in Europe — that he remembers.
“That was an incredible moment and emotion,” Alonso told ESPN. “From the inside, it was just like a relief. A weight out of the shoulders of so much pressure in the months before Brazil, because the championship was getting closer and closer, but you’re never 100% sure until it happens. So when it did happen, it was maybe 20 years of my life concentrated in those 10 seconds of celebration.”
It says much about Alonso that he is still racing today. It was a difficult road that led him to that early summit. That unlikely scream was born of an unlikely journey.
Spain had always been passionate about racing, but traditionally for two wheels, not four. From a young age, people who had watched him race had seen he was colossally talented, but the route from Spain to Formula 1 was uncharted. His August 2003 victory in Hungary was the first grand prix win by a Spaniard in F1 since the world championship had formed in 1950. Before him, there had been a handful of very forgettable Spanish drivers who had combined for a handful of points.
Now Alonso was standing on the mountaintop. The trail-blazing nature of his climb to the summit made that moment extra special.
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“I do remember the last couple of laps … everything I was thinking,” he said. “In my mind was all my karting days, my single-seater [career]. The casualties and challenges here and there that brought me to F1. Then the 2005 season in general. I was remembering my family and my grandparents. All the things from my early motorsport career, they were concentrated on that moment of joy.”
The debate around Alonso and the question of his legacy is a fascinating one. Still widely considered the most well-rounded driver of the modern era, to many he is still a talent unfulfilled.
Perhaps fittingly, given his longevity in the sport, the rest of 2005 — and his 2006 championship, won after a straight fight with Schumacher, and again clinched at Interlagos — have blurred in his memory.
“I hardly remember anything from those afternoons and nights, which is sad,” he said on the High Performance Podcast earlier this year, when he reflected extensively on missed titles with McLaren in 2007 and Ferrari in 2010 and 2012. “When I will look back on my career, I will see a lot of good things, good friendships, incredible experiences, but if I had the opportunity to live my exact life once more, maybe I don’t change my teams, my choices, these Ferrari titles, whatever, I would change to live a little bit more all those moments … What I regret more was not to enjoy my time.”
“Time” is the key word when discussing Alonso. He is now 44 and will race through his 45th birthday in 2026 at Aston Martin. The great man of the past and present has committed to owner Lawrence Stroll’s big-money project because he believes it is the team of the future.
How long he can go for is an open question, one even he does not have the answer to.
ALONSO’S VICTORY HAD a transformative impact back home, influencing a generation of drivers. One of the young Spaniards transfixed by what he was doing still shares a grid with him today. Carlos Sainz, who today drives for Williams, might not have needed a motorsport role model; his father, of the same name, had been one of the few Spaniards to make a name for himself on four wheels as a two-time winner of the World Rally Championship in the 1990s. Alonso’s emergence had a powerful impact on the teenage Sainz that even his father could not have managed.
“That’s exactly at the point where I was falling in love with the sport, with Formula 1,” Sainz told ESPN. “Fernando was a big culprit for me falling in love with the sport because I became a huge fan of his. I remember waking up every single day and going to my dad to tune in for Formula 1, to watch all the free practices, all the qualifying, all the races.
“That first world championship in Spain was huge, not only for me, but for so many other Spanish drivers. At the time, all the karting championships went from having 20, 30 participants to having 60 or 70 because we all wanted to be like Fernando Alonso.”
Ten years later, Sainz got the opportunity to live out that dream for real.
“Probably the moment I feel most proud of is Spain 2015, my first ever home grand prix, sharing the grid with him. I remember actually qualifying P5 on that Toro Rosso that year, a bit out of nowhere. And I had been exactly at that spot 10 years before that when I was then attending my first ever grand prix. And I went to that race just wanting to meet Fernando and wanting to get to see him live.
“I was like, ‘I’ve made it,’ and it’s all thanks to having an idol like him and looking up to him and wanting to be like him. Yeah, it was a great moment.”
In the blink of an eye, Formula 1 was not only popular in Spain, it was what everyone wanted to be doing. Alonso’s longtime manager and then-manager of Renault, Flavio Briatore, can remember just how different it used to be.
“Fernando was everything there,” Briatore told ESPN. “In Spain, [until him], there was never a big Formula 1 driver. When we took him, Formula 1 was not televised. It was only motorbikes. He changed it.”
Briatore, who had played a key role in the early career of Schumacher, overseeing his first two titles at Benetton, had been immediately convinced of Alonso’s talent. Briatore had gambled on him massively, signing Alonso to a long management contract and then placing him at tiny Minardi in 2001. Alonso managed to show his talent even at a backmarking team.
“As soon as we put him in there, Minardi was amazing,” Briatore said. A year on the sidelines as Renault test driver followed, before his elevation to a race seat in 2003, albeit at the expense of another rising star.
“After that, we had a contract with Jenson Button. I don’t renew the contract with Jenson, I put Fernando in the car, and all the U.K. press was really mad. I told the press, you know, ‘Be relaxed, time will tell if I’m right or wrong.’ You guys are shouting this and that and that and that, and I was right. I was right.”
Briatore was quickly vindicated. Alonso claimed his maiden race victory that year, although a winless 2004 followed. But when a rule tweak recalibrated the competitive order and put Renault in a straight fight with a fast-but-unreliable McLaren, Alonso rose to the top. A famous, passing-of-the-torch moment occurred at Imola that year in a battle with the once-dominant Ferrari of Schumacher, when Alonso was chased all the way to the finish line by the red car in front of the Italian flag.
“That’s obviously the most [attention grabbing] of my wins in 2005,” Alonso said to ESPN. “Funnily enough, I do still remember quite OK days like Imola.
“On the Saturday, I sat with Flavio. We had to make a decision on changing the engine and lose 10 [grid] places or keep the same engine. But it was damaged under their final inspection, one cylinder, so there was a debate on what to do with that engine. If detuning it a little bit, the power on that cylinder only, having a rich mix or something on the fuel, so it was a lot of technicalities on the conversation. But at the end, I was there and Flavio decided to race with the engine and take the risk. Obviously, we tried to manage the engine and the power and these mixed changes that we could do at the cost of power.
“But when we had a little bit of margin in the race, we detuned the engine. At the end, it was detuned for the last half of the race and Michael was putting a lot of pressure. Luckily, it was Imola and it was difficult to overtake.”
With the McLaren regularly failing to finish, Alonso and Renault eventually secured a fairly comfortable championship that day at Interlagos. Briatore’s decision to go for Alonso over Button had been more than vindicated.
Current Haas team principal Ayao Komatsu had experience working with them both, first as part of British American Racing (where Button moved in 2003) and then with Renault in 2006, on both occasions as a tire engineer with the test team.
“[Fernando] was just another level, completely another level, knowing that if you give him this tire and said, ‘OK, we need you to do, let’s say, 18-lap stint, but I want the last three laps, I want to be able to go at this pace,’ … he would just completely use up the tire by the end lap’ [exactly when needed]. Jenson couldn’t do that. He really couldn’t.
“I thought that was the limit, even if it’s a Formula 1 driver. But Fernando, I don’t know how he does it, he knows how much is left on tires. So, he will drive it in a certain level, and then last three laps, he just goes bang, bang, bang, bang, and then exactly at the end of sector, the tire’s dead.
“So, it was just totally another level. I thought, ‘Wow, this is a world champion.’ So, that was a huge eye-opener for me.”
IT’S DIFFICULT TO fathom now that the championship Alonso won 20 years ago in Brazil still represents half of his career titles. Alonso has not won a championship since 2006 and has not won a grand prix since 2013 — a baffling statistic for a driver considered to be the most complete of the modern era. The man hoping to emulate his maiden triumph this season, championship leader Oscar Piastri, summed it up best.
“I’ve got a lot of respect for Fernando. I don’t think his results or stats even tell close to the story of his talent,” the McLaren driver said to ESPN earlier this year. “He’s definitely a driver where the stats don’t tell the full story of his career, and I think he’s definitely one of the best drivers the sport has seen.”
As with Komatsu, to those who worked with him, there’s a special quality to the Spaniard’s abilities with a race car. Piastri’s current boss Andrea Stella is another with long links to Alonso, having been his race engineer through the two agonizing championship misses with Ferrari in 2010 and 2012. Stella also worked alongside Schumacher at Ferrari before that, giving him a unique insight into two modern greats.
“If you take a circle of qualities, where Fernando is very high [in everything] but potentially not the best in any of them, I think Michael was potentially the best in some of them, but in some others he was weaker than Fernando,” Stella told BBC Sport in 2018. “So Michael’s would be more like a star, whereas Fernando’s is more like a perfect circle.”
That is why the “well-rounded” tag sticks so strongly to Alonso. It was a label reinforced last decade when, broken by McLaren Honda’s abject lack of competitiveness, he took on a unique side hustle: attempting to win the Triple Crown. To do so, he would need to add wins at the Indianapolis 500 and 24 Hours of Le Mans to the Monaco Grand Prix victories he claimed in 2006 and 2007.
He might have won Indy in 2017, when he led for 50 laps, if not for an engine failure in the final third of the race. With Toyota, he went on to conquer Le Mans, first in 2018 and then again in 2019. It was the kind of success he had starved of in Formula 1. In 2020, he took on the infamously grueling, two-week, nearly 5,000-mile Dakar Rally and finished 13th.
Alonso’s lack of F1 success since his Renault titles has been put down to a number of things: bad luck, bad career choices or just plain bad machinery. His extracurricular activities became a way for him to remind the racing world of what he was capable of doing. Alonso’s first Indy 500 appearance was a good example, coming together at relatively short notice, and he was still competitive almost immediately.
“It was a crazy idea put together by me and Zak [Brown] at the time,” Alonso recalled. “And we had almost no time to practice. Le Mans the same, in a way. It was a new world, new car. With those things, when maybe the joy at F1 was not there, I needed it. I knew it somehow deep inside, always, but it was good that everyone understood that I can drive any car to the top level in a short period of time.”
When it was then put to him that maybe it helped vindicate his own talent during the difficult years, Alonso laughed: “My self-confidence is extremely high, so I didn’t have that problem! Perhaps sometimes I have a little bit too much. I don’t know if other athletes have it, but in my case, I never have any doubt about what I can do.”
Four-time world champion Max Verstappen, who has recently dabbled in endurance racing when not driving F1 cars, is another huge fan of Alonso.
“I admire him a lot, how he is as a person, as a racer,” Verstappen said during the Azerbaijan Grand Prix weekend. “At his age to still be that motivated to perform in Formula 1, but at the same time when he has done other things, going into endurance, doing Dakar, it’s pretty insane. It shows he’s just passionate about racing. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Formula 1 car or not.”
Verstappen has been on a run of success recently many expected Alonso could have in the years after 2005 and 2006.
“Yeah, he’s not won in a while but there’s a lot of people who never won a race in Formula 1 who perhaps could have won or should have won,” Verstappen continued. “That’s part of Formula 1, unfortunately, you don’t always get the right opportunities. Those years he won the titles, you could see his real talent. It’s doesn’t mean the pace is gone or like he’s not quick anymore, it’s just that the car doesn’t let him. It’s still nice to have him around and I have a lot of respect for what he’s doing.”
IT IS UNCLEAR now whether Alonso will add to his 22 pole positions, 32 race wins or two world championships before he hangs up his racing gloves. Keeping him in the sport is the insatiable desire to win that has always burned within him.
“Sometimes people put out in the news that Fernando was difficult to manage, but this is a lot of rubbish, really,” Briatore said. “I am completely upset whenever I hear this. Fernando is always a teammate. He’s always making everyone work together. The demonstration is now at Aston Martin. The car is not competitive, but he’s always there, pushing. Everyone knows what they need.
“He’s like a Rottweiler. He’s there all the time. You go in one place and the Rottweiler bites you all the time. That’s Fernando. That’s how he wants to win.”
Alonso returned to Formula 1 after a two-year hiatus with the catchy “El Plan” tagline in 2021, the mission to win himself another championship. In 2023, he switched from Alpine to Stroll’s ambitious, big-spending Aston Martin project, and the recent arrival of design legend Adrian Newey and the imminent F1 rule change has everyone dreaming of a championship challenge.
“It feels very possible, for sure,” Alonso said of victory prospects in 2026. “We have the right people and we have the right facilities. All the tools are there, so it’s just up to us. At the same time, I understand Formula 1 needs some time to glue everything together.”
As Briatore said when signing Alonso to Renault in 2003, time will tell. Those who know him say his talent has not diminished, even in the middle of his 40s. It is perhaps the measure of Alonso that if he never does taste any measure of F1 success again, he seems content with the legacy he would leave behind.
When asked what he thinks that legacy might be, Alonso paused for a moment. “I don’t know. It’s a good question,” he said. “I think people in the paddock will probably remember that I was an all-round driver. I was able to drive different cars with different competitiveness, always at the maximum. In different categories as well, different series in motorsport and try to be competitive in all of them. So that’s probably enough for me and this is a very good compliment already.
“But for the outside world, I think I will be forgotten very fast. Like everyone else. There is no one in the paddock, even Lewis [Hamilton] with seven championships, that after four or five years [without] that he’s off the radar, people will just focus on the newer generation. It happens always.”
There does seem to be a peace within Alonso, even if his career statistics relative to the other greats of the modern era seem wrong. He is often framed as the unluckiest driver of this generation, although he takes a philosophical approach to that question.
“Good luck, bad luck … I think it’s been 50-50, to be honest,” Alonso said. “The thing is that when you do 400-plus races, there are a lot of races with good luck and a lot of races with bad luck. But I think everything compensated, and even when I went to Le Mans, the second Le Mans, we were two minutes behind the leader one hour before the end and then they had a puncture, then they had a wheel that was not properly done, then they had a double pit stop … then I won the second Le Mans. That was a lot of luck on our side. Everything compensated.”
But, in finishing that answer, Alonso said it better than anyone else could, something that he and many other Formula 1 fans will hope he has a chance to put right one day.
“But [that it’s been] over 20 years [since my championship] and maybe more than 10 years since I won my last F1 grand prix … it doesn’t sound right to me.”
