Is Fernando Alonso responsible for Aston Martin's downfall?

The expression on Fernando Alonso's face in Austin after the qualifying session on Friday said it all. The Spaniard had seen himself get bumped out in Q1, an embarrassment that goes back to the 2022 season's campaign.

Aston Martin has since come a long way. Since Sebastian Vettel's retirement and Fernando Alonso's joining the team at the start of the season, things were looking up. You look at the 2023 F1 season progressing, and you see the team falling into oblivion.

While Lance Stroll tends to get a lot of criticism when it comes to Aston Martin's plight, should Fernando Alonso be held responsible for the team's downfall? Let's take a look.

Aston Martin's loss of pace

The first eight races of the season saw Aston Martin and Fernando Alonso secure six podiums. The driver was a frontrunner in all of them.

If the strategy was right, there was a possibility that he would have won the race in Monaco as well. In Canada, however, a major upgrade package was brought to the car, and from the very next race onwards, the car has gone backwards.

Aston Martin secured a podium in Canada as well; however, when it came to the race in Austria and onwards, the car was leapfrogged in terms of performance.

Looking back, the team's last podium secured at Zandvoort almost seems like a false dawn at this moment, as the race was quite chaotic and the main players were compromised at the start of the race.

Since then, the car has regressed at every race. It has been the 5th fastest car on the grid, and in Austin, both drivers were knocked out in Q1. While other teams have made decent progress, Aston Martin has regressed so much that it is alarming at this stage.

Fernando Alonso's chequered history with teams

This is where the questions about Fernando Alonso come up. The Spaniard has been in F1 for two decades now and hasn't had a championship-contending car since 2012.

There is, however, another pattern that's almost become stigmatized with the Spaniard. It is the worrying drop in form suffered by the team he drives for.

We've seen Fernando Alonso's second stint at Renault in 2008–09, leading to the French brand shutting down its operations; we've seen Ferrari disintegrate slowly in his 5 years with the team; and we've seen McLaren's horror run with Honda from 2015–17 while Alonso was part of the team as well.

During all of this, what's almost stigmatic is that there have been suggestions that Fernando Alonso is maybe not the best driver when it comes to driver feedback and car development.

Even when it comes to the current Aston Martin car, it has been built on Sebastian Vettel's feedback, was arguably the best at the start of the season, and has regressed ever since.

Should Fernando Alonso be held responsible, or is it the team?

This is where the question comes up, where we ask whether Fernando Alonso should be held responsible in some manner for the regression at Aston Martin.

Most importantly, because he's the one guiding the ship, if his input is not up to par with that of the engineers, then that can work against them.

What we've seen this season is that as soon as some new upgrades have been brought to the car, the car has regressed. Not only that, the team seems to be at odds when it comes to understanding what went wrong with the car.

This has been one of the major issues that has plagued Aston Martin. After Canada, the team said that the upgrades worked as planned. But it was quite evident that the car regressed in terms of performance.

Even after Austin, where Friday and Saturday were disastrous while Sunday was still salvaged to some extent, the team has once again claimed that the impact of the upgrades was according to expectations. Is there some truth to that? Mostly not, because the car was still the fifth-fastest car on the grid that day.

Ideally, it is tough to apportion blame on any single entity, and the driver does not build cars. But if something happens repeatedly in a driver's career, then is that a coincidence? Maybe, maybe not.

Let's wait for the season to unfold, as the team seems to have everything in place, and when, in such a scenario, it starts regressing in a manner that's surprising at best, questions will be asked. Is Fernando Alonso responsible? We will find out by the end of his stint at Aston Martin.