After several disagreements with Alpine when closing his contract with them for the next few years, Fernando Alonso chose to manage his future options in the paddock himself and behind the French team’s back.
The validity of contracts in Formula 1 is far from what any lawyer would like to recognizewith multiple clauses (performance, objectives…) that condition compliance with agreements that, at least today, are merely indicative.
The Silly Seasonevery summer break and every winter is nourished by weak pacts. The departure of Daniel Ricciardo from Renault a couple of years ago to head for McLaren caught the paddock by surprise, triggering a series of movements that they had not expected until then.
“He told me ‘Don’t worry, I haven’t signed with anyone else […] The next morning I saw the Aston Martin statement.”
In the case of Fernando Alonso, the move from the two-time Spanish champion from Alpine to Aston Martin has been announced without the French team previously communicating the termination of his contract with the Asturian driver, a way of publishing this agreement that He left many stunned … even in his own team.
With night and treachery
The same Monday with which the summer holidays started, at 10 in the morning, Aston Martin dropped the bomb: Fernando Alonso would join them from the 2023 season on a multi-year contract, presumably a 2+1, giving rise to all kinds of rumors about the next moves on the grid.
This message was the first news that many in Alpine had about the departure of the man from Oviedo. “That press release was the first confirmation I had”acknowledged Otmar Szafnauera character with whom #14 has not finished making good friends.
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“Obviously, when we’re in the paddock there are all kinds of rumours. I had heard rumors that at Aston Martin they were interested, and once you hear it chances are there have been conversations. There were other indications that they had had conversations, such as get out of it motor home at onceall those kinds of things, which I saw, but I was confident that even despite those conversations, not bad, we were very close», explained the Romanian leader.
Szafnauer assured that, before leaving Hungary, he asked Alonso directly about these recent events, to which he denied the majority. “They told me ‘No, no, I haven’t signed anything’, so I was a little surprised”he recounted.
“He said his attorney he would get in touch with us, and I thought he would. Before he left I confirmed that we would sign soon, and he said ‘Don’t worry, I haven’t signed with anyone else, we’ll get on with this in the next few days’, and then the next morning I saw the Aston Martin statement,” Szafnauer continued. .
Alonso’s age and a possible leak in the second year of this new contract, of which “there were only a couple of fringes left to close”, was what delayed the real offer of a definitive agreement by Alpine, which came to propose a 1-year contract in addition to another additional … but at the choice of the team, not Alonso, who wanted “more safety regardless of performance”.
“I was very confident that Fernando would continue with us. I thought it was a fair contract for both partiesand Ferdinand too. It seems that later he decided to do something else », concluded Szafnauer.