Racing
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Fernando Alonso said Aston Martin’s poor start to 2026 has not pushed him toward retirement, insisting he still feels “at my 100%” and does not want to leave Formula 1 “with a bad aftertaste.”
Speaking to media including RacingNews365, the Aston Martin driver made clear that the team’s form is not changing how he judges his own future. “Leaving the sport with a bad aftertaste is not always the best thing,” Alonso said. “These things, you can't choose when to stop racing, only Nico Rosberg did.”
Alonso, 44, is contracted through the end of 2026 and is weighing whether to keep racing or move into a new phase of life. But he said the deciding factor is not age, nor a difficult campaign with Aston Martin-Honda. It is whether he still feels fast enough to compete.
“Since I came back in 2021, it has been a gift to keep racing and to feel competitive,” he said. “I don't want to leave the sport when everyone is beating me, when I feel slow and I make mistakes and all these kind of things. I know that I'm at my 100% now and I want to leave also when I feel that way.”
That stance comes against a bleak backdrop for Aston Martin. The team’s new partnership with Honda has made a troubled start under the 2026 rules, with reliability and vibration problems adding to a lack of outright competitiveness. Aston Martin has spent much of the season fighting toward the back, and Alonso finished only two of the first four rounds.
The contrast in his comments is central to the story of his season. Alonso is not describing a driver who feels his level has dropped. The picture from his side is that the package is the problem, not his pace, with the speed there but the results not following.
He reinforced that point after the Miami Grand Prix, where he said Aston Martin’s drivers were “trying to entertain ourselves” while using races to learn more about energy management after limited winter testing mileage. Even then, he said the team’s immediate outlook remained harsh.
Alonso said the absence of reliability trouble in Miami was at least a step forward, marking two races in a row without those issues, but he admitted “the race pace wasn’t anything special.” He said Aston Martin was only trying to “hold on as best we could” to stop the gap from growing.
More importantly for the next phase of the season, he does not expect a major upgrade package soon. Alonso said no new parts are likely until around round 12 or round 14, which leaves Aston Martin trying to improve execution rather than unlock real lap time. As he put it, “We are P19 or P20, and the gap to the car ahead is 1 second,” so even gains of one or two tenths per race would not change the team’s position.
That is why Alonso’s retirement message matters beyond his contract status. His concern is not that 2026 is proving he can no longer do it, but that an uncompetitive car could distort the end of his career. For now, his position is the opposite of a driver ready to stop: he still believes he is performing at full capacity, and he has no intention of letting Aston Martin’s current struggles decide the timing of his F1 exit.