Fernando Alonso shouted loudest, so it was he who was heard. The two-time champion is no stranger to a soundbite and knows exactly how to stir the pot. In 2022, that came in the form of calling out Alpine for its unreliability. His best embellishment arrived following an electrical gremlin that prevented him from contesting July’s sprint race in Austria. At the start of his TV media pen duties, he reckoned already that the fragility had cost him 50 points.
When he was speaking to the written press a few minutes later, that had climbed as high as 70. A similar figure was offered after he retired in Singapore with a Renault power unit failure.
If the A522 had proved that little bit more robust, then there wouldn’t have been such a long-running fight for fourth in the constructors’ standings. Alpine would have been much better off than its eventual 14-point cushion to McLaren. That’s the logic.
But the legitimate rebuttal its papaya rival hasn’t shouted about is this: had Daniel Ricciardo mustered more than a third of the points that Lando Norris bagged (37 versus 122), then conceivably it would have been the Woking squad walking into winter as ‘best of the rest’.
“He can say that all he wants,” is Norris’s reply to Alonso. “He’s crashed a lot himself. So maybe if he stayed out of trouble, that would be the case. But reliability is part of Formula 1. And so is having two guys who can perform on the same level. We both seem to have one more
