‘I was so focused about it’ – Alonso names best race since his comeback that he prepared for more than any other

Fernando Alonso has cited the 2023 Monaco Grand Prix as his best race since making his F1 comeback, with the Spaniard acknowledging that this marked the most preparation he had put into one race throughout his entire career.

Having returned to the sport with Alpine in 2021 following a two-year hiatus – before making the switch to Aston Martin in 2023 – Alonso has scored nine podiums, with three of these seeing him finish in second place during a strong start to his first campaign with the British squad.

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An achievement that has eluded Alonso, however, is that of a win, something that the two-time world champion last earned back in 2013. Yet during Formula 1’s visit to Monaco in 2023, Alonso looked like he could potentially be on course to take a 33rd career victory.

When asked during an appearance on F1’s Beyond The Grid podcast – brought to you by Salesforce, a Global Partner of Formula 1 – to name his greatest race since returning to the sport, Alonso explained: “I would say Monaco 2023, because I think we started the season in ‘23 and we saw our car strengths were the slow-speed corners, traction, braking.

“Since Bahrain or Jeddah, I said to the team, ‘Don’t touch the car too much until Monaco. Whatever upgrades are coming, let’s try to wait for after Monaco. I don’t want to change the characteristics and the DNA of this car until we race in Monaco.’

“The first upgrade was anyway programmed for Canada, which was after Monaco, so that was not a risk. But slowly through the first couple of races, we were losing that good character of the car and that strength.

“We went to Miami and our weakest sector was the slow-speed sector. We went to Barcelona, our worst sector was the slow-speed sector. For whatever reason, it vanished a little bit, the good things about the car that we saw in the first races.

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“We came to Monaco and I was so focused about that race. I wanted to win that race. The Red Bull was [a] perfect machine, but Monaco is unique, so my biggest hope was to win Monaco.”

With this key goal in mind, Alonso set about preparing for the event at Monte Carlo in a meticulous fashion.

“Since Wednesday, the Monaco preparation for me was the biggest and most precise preparation I ever did in a weekend,” the Spanish driver continued. “Every bump of the circuit, every [piece of] data from 2022 that Aston had, 2021, watching races from the past.

“It was a lot of detail going into that race and I don’t think that the car was great, and we put the car 20 milliseconds from pole position thanks to an incredible last sector of Max [Verstappen].

“Then in the race again, we were not great. I think when it started to rain, we were 23 seconds behind Max, so I was losing a lot of ground. We were not fast enough, but again, we were close to winning, if we maybe change for another set of intermediate tyres instead of medium.

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“I think that was a lot of hard work to [get] close to a race win, so I say Monaco because I like that level of preparation and that level of performance, even when the car was not at that level.”

Pushed further on whether this marked the most preparation that he had put into a single race during his career, Alonso conceded: “I think so, yeah.”

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