Fernando Alonso

Honda has vowed to explain a mysterious problem with Fernando Alonso's power unit, but seven points from 17 rounds show Aston Martin's works project is short of pace as well as reliability.

Zak Brown has told Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri not to collide again with Red Bull seven points behind, while Rwanda moves to return F1 to Africa and Max Verstappen gains a new engineer.

Max Verstappen will race in Austin without his long-time engineer, Ferrari faces questions after Lewis Hamilton slid from third to sixth, and Liam Lawson's 2027 future is back under scrutiny.

There is something wonderfully Formula 1 about the fact that this weekend's "Bahrain Grand Prix" will be held nowhere near Bahrain.

There are weeks in Formula 1 when the news cycle feels scattered, and there are weeks when, look closely enough, everything connects.

Every so often a Grand Prix weekend produces a race report that reads like a footnote to everything that happened around it, and Baku is shaping up to be exactly that kind of event.

There are days when the news cycle hands you one obvious lead story, and there are days like this one, where half a dozen genuinely consequential threads run in parallel and none of them quite drowns out the others.

There's no grand prix this weekend, but F1's news cycle doesn't recognise fallow weeks any more.

Coulthard and Smedley's calls for faster, tech-assisted race control decisions highlight growing frustration with F1's current stewarding process.

There's no Grand Prix this weekend, but the news cycle hasn't noticed.

There are days on the Formula 1 news cycle that feel like housekeeping, and days that feel like genuine inflection points.

Formula 1's first visit to a new venue is always a data-gathering exercise as much as a race weekend, but the inaugural Spanish Grand Prix at Madring has generated rather more debate than the sport would have wanted.

Carlos Sainz has never been shy about calling out what he sees as injustice, but his latest target is a familiar and pointed one: Fernando Alonso.

Monza has a way of stripping the varnish off a season, and the days since the Italian Grand Prix have done exactly that.

Monza has always rewarded raw speed and nerve, but Sunday's race bore only a passing resemblance to the Temple of Speed as generations of fans have known it.

The Temple of Speed rarely does things by halves, and this Monza weekend has delivered its usual cocktail of nostalgia, controversy and late-breaking chaos before a wheel had even turned in anger for the 2026 Italian Grand Prix.

Monza's list of grid penalties has become almost as predictable a pre-race fixture as the tifosi's flags on the banking, but Saturday's fallout at the Temple of Speed carried a sharper edge than usual.

There's a particular energy to Monza that no other circuit on the calendar quite replicates — the cathedral of speed, the tifosi banking every hope on the red cars, and this year an added layer of intrigue because so many of the sport's power-unit and personnel storylines are converging on the Autodromo Nazionale at once.

Honda's power unit division finds itself in an uncomfortable spot: publicly backed by the very drivers whose comments have exposed its shortcomings.

A handful of points at Zandvoort, a well-worn cliché about hitting bottom before you bounce, and a 42-year-old driver who won't commit to his own future — this is the sum of the evidence being offered for a supposed Aston Martin revival.

Formula 1 arrives at Monza this weekend with the peculiar duality that only the Temple of Speed seems to generate: a sport obsessed with its future, parked inside one of its most reverent shrines to the past.

There is a particular irony in Jenson Button, of all people, being the one to speculate publicly on when Fernando Alonso might finally call time on his Formula 1 career.

The Monza weekend has delivered exactly the kind of narrative whiplash that keeps Formula 1 compelling even in a season that, on paper, looked settled by midsummer.

There are days on the Formula 1 calendar when the biggest news happens away from the stopwatch, and this is emphatically one of them.

The Dutch Grand Prix weekend has come and gone, but if anything, the racing itself is playing second fiddle to the sheer volume of off-track business now dominating the paddock conversation.

Fernando Alonso doesn't do idle chats. Twenty-two years and two world championships into a career defined by ruthless self-assessment, when the two-time champion sits down for what's being described as a "deep" conversation with Adrian Newey at Aston Martin's Silverstone campus, it is worth paying attention — not because such meetings are inherently newsworthy, but because of who was in the room and when it happened.

The Dutch Grand Prix has come and gone, but its consequences are still rippling through the paddock days later.

There is a particular kind of emotion that only shows up in Formula 1 when relief and vindication arrive at the same moment.

The paddock reconvenes this week with the championship picture more scrambled than it has been at any point since the summer break, and Zandvoort's fallout is doing most of the shaking.

Fernando Alonso does not deal in throwaway superlatives. Two decades into a Formula 1 career built on brutal honesty about machinery that has too often let him down, when the Spaniard describes a change at Aston Martin as "incredible," it is worth pausing on.

There's a certain irony in Zandvoort potentially bowing out of the calendar the way it arrived back on it — compact, chaotic and utterly unpredictable.

There's a particular flavour to F1's news cycle in the days before the paddock scatters for its August recess, and this week has it in abundance.

Fernando Alonso scoring a single point before the summer break should not, in any rational universe, be a headline achievement for a team with Aston Martin's ambitions.

Fourteen seats. That is the figure being quoted as this year's silly season gathers pace, and it tells you almost everything about the state of Formula 1's driver market as it stands: gridlocked, interdependent, and waiting on two men — Max Verstappen and Fernando Alonso — to make the first move.

The paddock has spent its summer break the way it always does — tyres cooling, rumours warming — and returns to find almost every major storyline sharpened rather than resolved.

Formula 1's summer shutdown is supposed to be the one fortnight when the paddock actually goes quiet.

There is a particular irony in Max Verstappen, a four-time world champion sitting inside the most stable and successful environment of his career at Red Bull, casting himself as the one facing the harder decision.

Weighing insider skepticism against the hype surrounding Aston Martin's upgrade-driven resurgence.

There's a particular rhythm to the Formula 1 calendar's quieter stretches, when the racing itself takes a back seat to speculation, and today has that feel in abundance.

Fernando Alonso has spent two decades defying the actuarial logic of Formula 1. He has outlasted teammates, team principals and entire engine regulations, and he has done so while remaining, on his day, as fast as anyone on the grid.

Formula 1 has a habit of using the summer break as a line in the sand — a moment to take stock before the season's second half rearranges everyone's expectations.

There is a certain irony in Aston Martin finding itself negotiating a pay rise for a 43-year-old driver at precisely the moment it has bet its entire competitive future on Adrian Newey's design genius and a 2026 regulation reset.

Formula 1's summer shutdown is meant to be the sport holding its breath — factories shuttered, phones (in theory) switched off, and nobody allowed to so much as sweep a garage floor.

The summer break has always been silly season's fertile ground, and 2025's is proving no exception.

There's a particular texture to the F1 news cycle in the dog days of a season – that stretch after one grand prix has faded and before the next has properly begun to dominate the conversation – and today's agenda captures it well.

Adrian Newey doesn't often wade into driver-market speculation. When he does, people listen — not because he's prone to hyperbole, but because he isn't.

Formula 1's driver market rarely waits for a quiet moment, and this year it has found its noisiest one yet: Max Verstappen's home race at Zandvoort, where reports suggest clarity on his future beyond 2025 could finally arrive.

The paddock has a habit of sounding loudest when the championship battle itself goes quiet, and the day after Hungary feels like exactly that.

Reports of a five-year Alonso contract, paired with scrutiny over Newey's progress and Horner's arrival, frame Aston Martin's high-stakes rebuild.

There's a particular mood that settles over Formula 1 once a season stops being about raw pace and starts being about who can out-engineer whom for the remaining months.

Aston Martin works to repair its Honda relationship while Adrian Newey addresses what life after Alonso looks like.

Formula 1 heads into its summer break with more loose threads than a season usually allows itself at this stage.

Newey's comments open a window into how significant Alonso's eventual departure would be for Aston Martin's project.

Incidents involving three cars are rarely as simple as they first appear, and the Sainz-Piastri clash is turning into exactly that kind of forensic puzzle.

Hungary has a habit of clarifying things. The tight, twisting Hungaroring rarely produces a shock result, but it has a way of confirming trends that had been building quietly for weeks.

The Hungarian Grand Prix weekend has a habit of arriving just before the summer break like a school report card — and this year's edition has been unusually busy with both praise and complaint.

Aston Martin's Hungary upgrade has alarmed rivals like Haas and Williams while giving Alonso a scare of his own in Q1.

The Hungaroring has a habit of asking F1 people to solve puzzles that have nothing to do with lap time, and this weekend has delivered on cue.

Friday practice at the Hungaroring rarely settles anything definitively, but for Aston Martin it carried more significance than most.

The Hungaroring has a habit of arriving mid-summer as a psychological watershed rather than just another round on the calendar, and 2026's edition is shaping up to be exactly that.

With summer break approaching, the futures of two veteran stars could reshape the entire driver market.

There is a particular kind of upgrade that gets rolled out quietly, absorbed into a car's evolution without much fanfare.

Formula 1 arrives at the Hungaroring with the paddock still picking through the wreckage of Spa, and this weekend feels less like a fresh start than an extension of last Sunday's arguments.

The grid at Spa-Francorchamps rarely looks like the one that emerges from qualifying, and this weekend's Belgian Grand Prix has taken that tendency to something of an extreme.

There are Grands Prix where the paddock mood settles quickly around what will happen on Saturday and Sunday, and there are weeks like this one at Spa-Francorchamps where the racing itself feels almost secondary to everything swirling around it.

Formula 1's attention this week is split neatly in two: half the paddock is looking backwards, litigating the first flurry of races under the new regulations, while the other half is looking ahead with genuine unease to what Spa-Francorchamps might do to cars that are already struggling to get through a lap on a full charge.

There's a particular texture to an F1 news cycle when a season is genuinely alive at the front and the driver market is simultaneously boiling over, and today has it in spades.

British Grands Prix have a habit of producing storylines that ripple on for weeks, and this year's edition looks no different.