It must have been surreal and thrilling for Fernando Alonso to find himself in a points position moments after the start of the 2026 Chinese Grand Prix. That Aston Martin he's driving is a worthless piece of crap, but because half the grid has still not figured out how to work the start of a race with the new engine regulations, there's a particularly crazy frenetic scramble when the lights drop. This time Alonso shot from 18th, where he'd qualified, all the way up to 10th. Imagine it: That awful car, that contemptible rattling disaster, soaring into the points. Baby, you're a firework!
It could not last. First of all, apart from everything else wrong with it, the Aston Martin is not very fast. Alonso was back in 13th a lap later, and then 14th, and then 15th. He stayed out during the safety car caused by the inevitable failure of his teammate's car, but the decision lifted him only into 11th. When the racing fired up again, all the freshened cars blew by, and then the real indignities began. Alonso was passed on lap 15 by Serio Pérez, driving a Cadillac that for all its competitive relevance might as well have wood side-panelling and a kayak slung overhead. The new overtake mode has so far encouraged a lot of reciprocal overtaking, and so Alonso was soon able to scoot past Pérez, but he couldn't hold the spot, and the two went back and forth for a bit, contesting their own sad little sideshow down there at the back of the pack. During one of Pérez's overtakes, Alonso offered a friendly little wave to his veteran opponent. Nice to see you!
This would not be the only time that Alonso took his hands from his steering wheel. Aston Martin has not yet solved the terrible engine vibrations that rattle its car to pieces. Lance Stroll was spared the suffering caused by this jack-hammer action when his own car crapped out early, but Alonso's car continued to propel itself forward and so he bravely held out for more than 30 laps, without a normally timed pit stop to give his poor battered mitts a rest. The vibrating picked up around lap 20 and soon became severe. "It was difficult today, we found more vibrations than any other session of the weekend," Alonso said after the race. "I started to lose the feeling in my hands and my feet, so it was not a nice feeling."
In an effort to stay out as long as possible, Alonso resorted to using long straights to restore feeling to his extremities. The onboard camera showed Alonso dropping his hands from the wheel and making frantic fist shapes, while traveling at terrifying high speeds, but at least not while turning.
Fernando Alonso, justo después de hacer su parada, se ve obligado a retirar el coche por fuertes vibraciones. Aquí la on board de la vuelta previa a su retirada, donde se aprecia que el piloto quita las manos del volante en las rectas.#ChineseGP#F1
— Pole Position F1 (@pole-position.bsky.social) 2026-03-15T11:59:18.596Z
Alonso finally pit for medium tires, but fresh rubber did not solve the shaking and by this time he was a lap down. Aston Martin retired the car one lap later, sparing Alonso a lot of pointless punishment. Honda, the engine partner blamed by Aston Martin for basically everything wrong with their 2026 car, says things are improving. Shintaro Orihara, Honda's trackside general manager and someone who Alonso would not be entirely wrong to attack with a truncheon, said Sunday that his team has "improved the vibrations on the systems side," while acknowledging that this has not yet translated to improvements in driver comfort.
Alonso, throwing a wet blanket over these gestures at optimism, says these systems-side improvements aren't anything to celebrate. "Some of the steps we did were achieved artificially,” he said, per Motorsport. "Just lowering the RPM of the engine and things like that, so everything vibrates less. But in the race, obviously, you still need to go high in some of the RPM when you make an overtake move, or when you have to recharge or something like that." In either case, Alonso is stuck with a car that almost certainly cannot complete a full Sunday race, which is a kind of blessing, because 50-plus laps of keeping it on the track without dropping down to parking-lot speeds would reduce Alonso's hands and feet to shredded nubs.
If there's a silver lining for Aston Martin, they can congratulate themselves for having completed more racing laps than the reigning Constructor's Champions. And they can look forward to all the development opportunities presented by an April that is now entirely raceless, after Formula 1 formally canceled Grand Prix weekends in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. Maybe they can make lemonade: Certainly they've got the lemons for it.
