Determined to go all out to, at least, fight for what would be his third title in the drivers’ championship, Fernando Alonso is willing to do his best physically to arrive prepared at his highest level in 2022.
Despite having been away from the single-seaters for two years, not so from the circuits after taking victory at the 24 Hours of Daytona, in addition to a second victory at the 24 Hours of Le Mans that catapulted him to the WEC title before testing fortune on the Dakar for the first time, Fernando Alonso did not start in 2021 in the best of ways.
The bicycle accident in Switzerland that Thursday, February 11, conditioned his return to the tracks, forcing him to modify his entire initial approach. “In 2021 I couldn’t do a proper preparation. After the bicycle accident, I was only counting down the days to Bahrain. I arrived just in time for Bahrain, but not with a proper physical program,” explained #14.
Longing for a “different” preparation for this year in the physical aspect, since in his opinion the single-seaters of the new generation will be “very similar in terms of driving, forces and lap times”, Alonso trusts to give the best of himself to arrive with the batteries recharged to the first race of the year.
“So this winter I want to do a little more. Obviously I don’t train the same now, at 40, as when I was 23. You have to train more, stretch more, have a different eating routine. You have to do a lot of other things to be just as good physically, with the same strength.”
Where is your limit?
Given that his physical limitation will not be so much in 2022, how far can Alonso go in full condition? “I am prepared for it, that is also the reason why I have come back. Too you have to make more sacrifices, but that’s the plan for the winter, I’m going to be as strong as possible. I know that I will have to train and that I will have to do more things than other drivers because I am older than them, “he snapped.
Although the 2021 Formula 1 season brought him “closer” to his limit, the Asturian driver confessed that he was unaware of his highest point of performance. «It’s hard to know where the limit is and when we could reach it, but I think we need a good winter, that’s for sure, and prepare a little better than last year, the accident in February did not help.
Successfully operated on his jaw after mid-January, Alonso assures that “if the car is competitive, I am convinced that I will be 100%”, regretting that a preseason of just 6 days is not the preparatory time that would have liked it though 3 days They are already more than he had in the last preseason.
“Probably, the biggest limitation was the day and a half of preseason», he detailed. “If it had been a normal winter, where you spend 4 or 5 days in the car, it would have been enough to detect a couple of problems, fine-tune the steering and some things that I was missing at the beginning of the year. I would say that was the biggest challenge: not having a proper winter preseason.”
“It wasn’t a big deal, but I understand that for some of the others, to see that I was not competitive in 4 or 5 races was a bit of a surprise, because I came back. Even if you’ve been out of the sport for two years, people always have high expectations, some think you’ll be fast immediately, and I wasn’t. I wasn’t sad, but I didn’t like to disappoint anyone. I was convinced that in time everything would return to normal, just as it happened at the end of the year,” Alonso concluded.