The battle between the six F1 teams behind the regular top four frontrunners is incredibly tight this year, and the rewards for getting it right are substantial.
Thus any retirement that costs priceless points is inevitably frustrating, and that was certainly the case for Fernando Alonso at Monza.
Having surprised himself and the team by making Q3 and starting eighth (helped by Lewis Hamilton’s penalty) the Spaniard had a solid run in the first part of the race.
He was running eighth when he jumped protégé Gabriel Bortoleto in the pits, but shortly afterwards he slowed and headed to the pits after a spectacular suspension failure on the exit kerbs at Ascari.
Such retirements are rare, especially 16 races into the season when cars have gone through a lot of punishment and usually any fragility would have been exposed. And like everyone else Alonso had clattered over the same kerbs many times over the course of the weekend.
It was particularly galling for the former World Champion in that it happened while a decent score was on the cards, and it wasn’t the first time in 2025 that points have gone astray for him, following a PU issue in Monaco, while he also had brake problems early in the Chinese GP.
“We’re using that kerb every lap, basically,” said Alonso when I asked him about the Monza stoppage. “Only in our car we had the suspension problem. And always these things happen when we have a scoring race.
“We had some races that we were dead last and nothing happened, like Spa that we are running one lap behind the leaders.
“Monaco, I think I was P6 retired with an engine problem. Today, I was P7 and I retired with a suspension problem. So yeah, there are dozens of points that the luck probably was not with us.”
He added: “It’s frustrating that I should have maybe 20-30 points more than what I have not down to me. But yes, it’s the way it is, unfortunately. I’m getting used to it.”
That total might have been a little exaggerated, but he made his point. He also didn’t really see the strong performance prior to his retirement as an upside.
“I don’t need to have good performance,” he said. “I need the points, and the performances are always good, and I don’t remember having a very bad performance, on the team or on my side in 22 seasons. So it’s not really important.”
As of Sunday night the team had no explanation for the failure, with the relevant parts obviously being rush back to Silverstone for proper analysis.
“No, we didn’t see anything,” said Mike Krack. “It would have been easy to say he went wide or something, but we didn’t see anything unusual. And that is why I think it’s important to do this kind of analysis properly.
“It’s easy to point at the driver, it’s easy to point any kind of incident. You need to stay factual in such situations.
“What we had to do is tell Lance to be careful in that area. And that is all you can do in such a situation, make sure that the sister car goes a little bit careful, even if it’s not related. But that is something that you have to do. And then you have to do the analysis properly afterwards.”
Krack conceded that there have been issues that didn’t necessarily reach the public domain related to the loadings that current cars go through.
“With this generation of cars, we have seen issues that we have never had,” he said. “A lot is also because the cars are touching a lot more with the floor.
“So we have seen in other areas failures that we have never had before, not that they have led to DNF, but where we never had anything like that, because the cars are running so stiff and so low, so there is a different loading on the car.”
Alonso might not have been too excited about the performance but until his retirement it had been a well-executed race for driver and team, and while he might have lost seventh to late stopper Alex Albon he should have been at least eighth.
Those points would have provided an extra cushion over the likes of Racing Bulls and Sauber, both of those chasing teams having also gained from the Aston stopping.
“I think the strategy went really well, because everything went to plan, more or less,” said Krack.
“We know Gabriel in front was very fast on the straight, so we could take his DRS. We were dreaming a bit to replicate the Austria race, where we were in the DRS of Liam [Lawson] all the time. And it worked out pretty well.
“I think we called at the right moment to box, managed to pass Gabriel, and it would have been quite a strong finish, I think. We had a little bit the upper hand in the beginning on the hard.
“I don’t know how we would have gone obviously later on in the race. Albon was fast, I think it would have been difficult [to beat him], but I think we could have finished in the points.”