Fernando Alonso was one of the protagonists in the press conference before Bahrain Grand Prix.
The two-time Asturian champion has assessed the expectations of Aston Martin and his AMR24 after three days of pre-season and has laughed off questions about his future and a possible interest from Mercedes in acquiring his services.
“Mercedes? First I have to decide whether or not I want to continue competing in Formula 1,” Alonso said with a telling smile. The Spaniard ends his contract with Aston Martin at the end of this season and has not yet started negotiations for a renewal. “I will have to decide whether to continue in F1 in a few weeks. I feel good now, but it’s a demanding calendar and in 2026 there will be new regulations that will be challenging or maybe not. We’ll see. I’ll do a few races to decide,” he said.
For now he prefers to focus on the World Championship which starts this Thursday with the first two free practice sessions of the Bahrain GP. Given what was seen in the tests, everything indicates that Red Bull and his triple champion Max Verstappen They will be the big favorites again. In fact, Alonso was ironic again when asked if he had the tools to beat the Dutchman and gave him a new nickname: “I still don’t have the tools and Max is the collector.”
Regarding the performance of AMR24, Fernando has been cautious: “Let’s wait for a few races. Bahrain is a county with very special characteristics, so we have to wait for Australia or even Japan. Maybe until then we won’t be able to have a clear idea about the order and performance of the teams. I think the car has taken a step forward, which is the first objective of the pre-season, but I don’t know if it will be enough. We have to wait”.
“Everything is working as expected. Last year we started with a good base and we were surprised how well it went at the beginning. It will be interesting if we can maintain the pace of developments compared to the top teams, because we have not achieved those expectations in 2023 “We need a few races to establish the competitive order of the cars. We do a lot of testing here, we know the track a lot and it can cause confusion. I would not pay too much attention to the results in this first race”, concluded the Asturian, who at the age of 42 is about to start his 21st season in the World Cup.
