Fernando Alonso has never been shy about stating the obvious, and after Friday practice at the 2026 Monaco Grand Prix, he had a lot of obvious to state. Speaking following Practice 1 in Monaco, the two-time world champion was keen to say it how it is: “This is probably the worst generation of cars I ever drove in Monaco.”
Coming from a driver whose career stretches back over two decades and includes championship campaigns across multiple regulatory eras, that’s not a throwaway line. The specific complaint isn’t about pace, it’s about predictability.
The energy recuperation system forces drivers to lift through corners rather than push flat, and Alonso argues that’s creating serious inconsistency precisely where you need the car to behave itself.
Monaco, with its unforgiving barriers and zero margin for error, makes that problem dramatically worse.
“The way you charge the battery, with the braking and lifting off and things like that, obviously creates a lot of inconsistency into the engine braking of the car,” Alonso explained to Motorsport.com. “Sometimes you have less, sometimes you have push and sometimes not. If the battery is completely full, then you don’t recharge because the battery is full. So you don’t have engine braking. It’s like pushing.”
The Aston Martin Problem Makes It Worse
On top of the wider regulations issue, Alonso was caught out by the AMR26’s unpredictable downshifts during FP1, losing the rear on the approach to the Nouvelle chicane and making contact with the wall. He said: “Monaco is not the place to have a random downshift, and you have rear [brake] locking or [engine] pushing or something like that. Then you will crash into the wall, and the driver will look stupid.”
The driveability problems he describes as “way too inconsistent” were compounded by what Alonso called “chronic understeer,” with set-up changes over the course of the day failing to meaningfully address it.
By the end of Friday practice, Cadillac was 0.178 seconds faster than Aston Martin, and Racing Bulls had a 0.546-second margin – on the shortest track of the season, where gaps are typically compressed.
Aston Martin is still rooted to the bottom of the constructors’ standings with zero points, making Alonso’s weekend at the circuit he’d been cautiously optimistic about before arriving look increasingly grim.
This criticism isn’t new, either. Alonso has been consistent on this since pre-season testing in Bahrain, arguing early on that a car so dependent on energy recovery ends up reducing risk through corners – the precise area where a driver’s talent should matter most.
He reiterated that position ahead of the Canadian Grand Prix while F1 was discussing potential 2027 changes, which would shift the power split away from the current near-50/50 balance between internal combustion and electric power back toward a more traditional 60/40 ratio, though that outcome is far from guaranteed, as manufacturers haven’t reached an agreement and any change could slip to 2028.
Alonso’s verdict on that prospect? “It’s just the rules. Hybrid cars should not be racing. It’s as simple as that.”
Not every driver agrees with his position. Carlos Sainz, for example, has taken a less absolute stance, viewing the power unit regulations as a reasonable endpoint that doesn’t necessarily damage the spectacle.
But Alonso is in good company on the broader frustration. Max Verstappen has called the new cars “anti-racing,” and both he and Charles Leclerc have complained that energy management has all but eliminated the challenge of a genuinely flat-out qualifying lap.
The irony of all this playing out in Monaco, the race most associated with driver craft, precision, and reading the circuit corner-by-corner, is probably not lost on Alonso. He arrived here hoping the slow-speed nature of the track would neutralize Aston Martin’s power deficit. Instead, he found a different set of problems waiting for him. Pretty much every variety of problems, in fact.
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