Fernando Alonso

Fernando Alonso's career has now stretched across nearly a quarter-century of Formula 1, which tells you almost everything you need to know before a single race result is mentioned. Growing up in Oviedo, Spain, he was karting almost as soon as he could reach the pedals, built by a father who welded him his first kart, and by his late teens he was recognised as one of the most complete natural talents Spanish motorsport had ever produced. He made his F1 debut with the struggling Minardi team in 2001, a baptism that taught him how to extract results from cars with no business scoring any.

Renault gave him his big break, and Alonso repaid them by becoming, in 2005, the youngest World Champion the sport had ever seen at that point — then backed it up with a second title in 2006, memorably ending Michael Schumacher's era of Ferrari dominance in the process. Those two championships remain the anchor of his reputation: proof that at his absolute best, few drivers in history have been faster or more complete.

What followed was two decades of being, by near-universal consensus among his peers, one of the two or three best drivers on the grid without ever adding a third title. A difficult spell at McLaren alongside a rookie Lewis Hamilton in 2007 ended acrimoniously; a return to Renault followed a strange team-orders scandal that overshadowed his own driving; and then came his Ferrari years, 2010 to 2014, which produced the cruellest near-misses of his career — title fights lost by a handful of points across multiple seasons, often through no fault of his own driving. A frustrating McLaren-Honda spell followed, productive mostly as proof of how much a driver can be let down by an engine partner, before Alonso stepped away from full-time F1 entirely to chase other goals, including the Le Mans 24 Hours, which he won twice.

He returned to the grid with Alpine in 2021, and then moved to Aston Martin in 2023, a team being rebuilt with serious ambition and investment by owner Lawrence Stroll. Alonso, by then in his forties, delivered some of the most eye-catching drives of his career in that first Aston Martin season, dragging podium finishes out of a car that had no business achieving them through pure racecraft and defensive brilliance that drivers half his age couldn't match.

He remains on the grid today, still competitive, still combative, still visibly loving the fight more than most drivers a third his experience. Whether a third championship ever arrives is genuinely uncertain at this stage of his career — but Alonso has never really needed the extra trophy to prove what everyone in the paddock already agrees on: he's one of the greatest to ever do this.