Alonso weighs quitting F1 for a WEC return with Aston Martin
Alonso won a WEC title and two Le Mans crowns with Toyota, and Aston Martin could be his way back to them
Fernando Alonso may have raced his last competitive season in Formula 1. According to GPblog, the 45-year-old is weighing retirement from F1 at the end of this year and a move to the World Endurance Championship in 2027, where he would drive Aston Martin's Valkyrie hypercar. Nothing has been signed and Alonso himself has said nothing, but for a driver sitting nineteenth in the standings with three points, the logic is not hard to follow.
A season that has given him nothing to stay for
Alonso has scored in only two races all year, tenth in Monaco and ninth at Zandvoort. He has retired from five others. After fourteen rounds the two-time world champion is nineteenth, and Aston Martin's AMR26 has not responded to its upgrades, leaving the team scrapping near the bottom of the constructors' table on the same three points. For months he has refused to give a definitive yes on a twenty-fourth F1 season, and the paddock has read that as a man keeping his options open rather than one committed to staying.
He has been here before, and he won
The WEC is not unfamiliar ground for Alonso. He took the world endurance title with Toyota across the 2018 and 2019 season and won the 24 Hours of Le Mans twice in that spell, adding the sport's biggest single race to a CV that already carried two F1 crowns. A return would put him back in a category where he has actually stood on the top step, at an age where competitive F1 machinery is no longer coming his way.
The Aston Martin link is the natural one. The British marque runs a factory Hypercar programme that already fields a full roster: Harry Tincknell, Tom Gamble, Ross Gunn, Alex Riberas, Marco Sørensen and Roman De Angelis. That lineup sits sixth of the eight manufacturers in the Hypercar class, and most of those drivers are expected to stay on for 2027, so exactly where Alonso would fit is one of the bigger unknowns in the story.
A steadier paddock than the one he would leave
A WEC move would also drop Alonso into a championship that has just steadied itself. The FIA and the ACO recently confirmed their promoter agreement runs through the end of 2027, settling the questions over the series' stability that had been swirling a fortnight ago, and manufacturers are busy locking in their driver rosters, Ferrari having just re-signed Nicklas Nielsen and Yifei Ye. Aston Martin adding a name like Alonso would be a statement about how seriously it takes the class.
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For Alonso the calculation is a cold one. He is 45, stuck in a car fighting the wrong end of the grid, and the Aston Martin F1 project he joined chasing a title is nowhere near delivering one. The WEC offers him a factory hypercar, a badge he already races under, and a category where he has won at the highest level. A driver this proud would rather end his career winning at Le Mans than retiring from another Grand Prix in a car that scores three points a season.
