Fernando Alonso will race on. The 45-year-old confirmed on Tuesday that he has signed a new deal with Aston Martin for the 2027 Formula 1 season, taking him into a 24th year in the sport and pushing the start of his career — the 2001 Australian Grand Prix — a quarter of a century into the past. Lance Stroll will stay alongside him.
The decision arrives after a season that would have persuaded most drivers to stop. Aston Martin have spent 2026 scrapping at the wrong end of the constructors’ standings, and Alonso’s highlights amount to a 10th place in a chaotic Monaco Grand Prix and a ninth in the Netherlands. His last podium was third at the 2023 Sao Paulo Grand Prix. His last win was in Spain in 2013, the 32nd of a career that also contains two world titles — the second of them 20 years ago, with Renault.
Speaking to BBC Sport in his only English-language interview about the decision, Alonso gave a blunt reason for continuing.
“First, this is my life,” he said. “I have this in my blood and I keep racing.” Then the sharper version: “I still feel as fast as anybody.”
Fast, even when nobody is watching
That self-assessment is the core of it. Alonso pointed to the Dutch Grand Prix, where he finished ninth in a car with no business being there, holding off Alpine’s Pierre Gasly and Racing Bulls’ Yuki Tsunoda for lap after lap. It was the kind of drive that used to define his reputation. In 2026, it barely registered.
“You only prove to people when you are in the podium or you are on TV,” he said, before adding that he is “at peace with this period of time that I’m anonymous”. Privately, the verdict has not changed: “I’m better than that guy. I’m better than that other guy.”
There is a second motivation, and it is less about lap time. Alonso, the oldest driver on the grid and one of the few who raced in the V10 era, says he feels a responsibility as an elder statesman to push the sport towards better decisions. He has been F1’s loudest critic of the 2026 regulations, calling the new formula the “battery world championship” and describing corners as “charging stations” where drivers harvest energy rather than attack. The willingness of the FIA and F1 to acknowledge the problem — and a planned shift from the current near 50-50 combustion-electric split towards 60-40 by 2028 — has been enough to keep him interested.
The Newey project is only one year old
The other pull is Adrian Newey. The designer joined Aston Martin as managing technical partner in March 2025, and his first season working with Alonso has been compromised: a car developed under a delayed timeline, a returning Honda works engine programme that lost institutional knowledge during its temporary exit from the sport, and reliability and vibration problems that both drivers have felt through the steering wheel.
Walking away now would mean leaving after the worst possible sample size. Newey’s history — at Williams, McLaren and Red Bull — is of cars that arrive late and then dominate. Alonso has been on the wrong side of that pattern before, most painfully with McLaren-Honda between 2015 and 2017, when three seasons yielded no podiums and a driver at his peak spent Sundays parked on the grass. He says he believes Honda’s restructuring makes this a different proposition, and he describes his relationship with Aston Martin and owner Lawrence Stroll in family terms.
What one more year actually buys him
The calculation is simple enough. Alonso has spent the past decade chasing a third world championship that has repeatedly slipped from reach — the Abu Dhabi finale of 2010 and 2012 with Ferrari, the wasted McLaren years, the 2023 Aston Martin surge that faded after eight podiums in the first half of the season. Signing for 2027 means betting one more year of his life on Newey solving a regulation set that Alonso himself does not much like.
He has also become a father, with his son Leonard born in March 2026. Rather than an argument for retirement, he has framed it as the opposite: travelling with his family improves the life rather than complicating it.
The commitment is for 2027, but Alonso left the door visibly ajar. “I see that it would not be only one year,” he said, “but I don’t have any pressure to think about it.”
For a driver who once said he would know instantly when it was time to stop, that is about as clear a signal as the grid is going to get.
Sports journalist and editor at SportsPortal.net. Covers cricket, football, Formula 1, tennis, and basketball with a focus on how global sports connect with Pakistani audiences. Follows the PSL, Pakistan national cricket team, Premier League, and major international tournaments. Has reported on sports for digital audiences since 2021.
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