All Anyone Could Talk About At The Abu Dhabi GP Was Alonso's V10 Demo Run
An F1 season like no other has drawn to a close. The sport’s efforts to cram 17 Grand Prix into a relatively short period gave us the return of some iconic tracks, with other circuits hosting their first F1 races ever. Although the championship battle hasn’t been at all close, we’ve had some great racing, seen George Russell get the subbing job of a lifetime, and witnessed incredible safety advances quite clearly save Romain Grosjean’s life.
And yet, in the middle of the Abu Dhabi weekend, all anyone could talk about was the past. Before Sunday, F1 Twitter was dominated by talk of Fernando Alonso being reunited with his 2005 title-winning Renault R25. Yes, that’s one F1’s final full year of the V10.
Granted, Renault has run this heritage car plenty of times before, and we even saw Richard Hammond have a go in the R25 on Top Gear a few years back. But Alonso wasn’t interested in giving the car a relaxed demo lap or two - he was properly on it.
In the onboard footage above, we see Alonso - who’s racing with the Renault team next year - lapping around seven seconds off Max Verstappen’s 2020 Abu Dhabi pole lap. His fastest run got that gap down to about four seconds, roughly matching Lewis Hamilton’s fastest lap from the 2019 race with a circa 1min 39sec effort, Motorsport.com reports. Astonishing for a 15-year-old car, even if it was running slicks rather than period-correct grooved tyres.
As well as diverting the online F1 conversation, Alonso’s R25 antics proved disruptive in the paddock too, with numerous interviews noisily interrupted by the V10 howl. Hamilton was seen visibly distracted by one of the Spaniard’s runs while speaking to Will Buxton, looking around before saying, “That sound is just so good man. The greatest sound of a racing car ever. I hate that they got rid of it”.
Alonso clearly agrees. “I think not only the fans, everyone in the paddock, we miss the sound,” he said, adding, “We miss the Formula 1 that we got in love with when we were kids and we were watching television.”
Growing up on a diet of World Rally Championship highlights and lengthy Gran Turismo 2 sessions, a life in cars was as good as inevitable for Matt.
Comments
Legit the most exciting part of this race weekend. The race itself was exceedingly boring, just like every race at Yas Marina.
2016 , the only time a thriller was set at Yas Marina. Anyway, someone should set Yas Marina ablaze with car bombs provided by Hamas since Yas Marina produces a GP that was as exciting as American humor. I’d rather had F1 racing in Shuto Expressway around Tokyo, Kawasaki and Yokohama, in open traffic, than in Yas Marina, I can’t keep myself awake when watching Abu Dhabi GP.
The Renault R25 and the R26 were the F1 cars of my childhood. I was fascinated with its color, above the V10 engine (which NGL it’s so ear-gasmic that I always humming to it ever since I was a kid), and I wanted those cars won the race with Alonso driving.
And I think both Alonso and Hamilton were spot on about the V10 nostalgia, all people (drivers and fans) really missed the Steven Tyler-esque F1 V10. The high revs, the metal-esque scream, the adrenaline-inducing F1 V10s that makes classic V6 Turbos and the current V6 Hybrid Turbos sounds like every auto-tune singers, K-Pop artists and mumble rappers combined, still can’t beat the ‘metaly’ sound of F1 V10. The only kinds of good sounding V6s on racing cars were the Dino Ferrari V6 on the back of a 1978 Alitalia Lancia Stratos and the tuned C32B on time attack tuned NSXs like the Route Ks NSX. I think both sounds even better than the current F1 V6T Hybrids.
it looks like its got more up to date slicks on rather than the grooved tyres that the V10s used to have so i reckon his lap time would have been insane