Aston Martin came to Monza hoping for a bit of straight-line respite. Instead, both cars were parked before the race had even settled into a rhythm, and the team’s already grim season found a new low at the one venue where hiding is impossible.
Fernando Alonso was the first to go, called into the pit lane and retired midway through the Italian Grand Prix after Aston Martin flagged suspected car damage. The team has not said what caused it, which tells you plenty about how these updates usually go: vague now, forgotten by Thursday. Moments later, Lance Stroll rolled to a stop at Turn 1, triggering a virtual safety car while marshals shoved his stricken car behind the barrier. Aston Martin pointed to a suspected hydraulic issue on his car.
Two cars, two separate failures, one afternoon. If there is a silver lining here, someone at Aston Martin will need to find it, because from the outside this looks like exactly the kind of weekend that ends up in a debrief nobody enjoys attending.
A Weekend That Was Already Going Wrong
This was not a case of a strong weekend undone by bad luck. Aston Martin had lacked pace throughout the event, and Monza, of all circuits, is not a place where a car can bluff its way to respectability. Long straights and low-downforce demands expose a slow car mercilessly, and Aston Martin’s cars were exposed well before either retirement arrived.
Saturday had already delivered a diagnosis of sorts. Lance Stroll set an unwanted record with his 100th Q1 elimination, a number that says more about the trajectory of his current machinery than any single lap ever could. Alonso and Stroll were also demoted to the pit lane for parc fermé breaches before the race had even started, meaning both drivers were already fighting from the back of the pack before mechanical gremlins finished the job.
Verstappen’s Warning Looms Larger
Aston Martin were not the only ones nursing fragility fears heading into Sunday. Max Verstappen, who qualified fifth, had already flagged a mechanical issue at the rear of his Red Bull during qualifying, describing the car over team radio as a “car of paper.” His plea heading into the race was blunt: he simply wanted a car that stayed in one piece for the full distance, pointing out that something has broken too often this season, brakes included.
Verstappen’s complaint and Aston Martin’s double retirement are not connected, but they sit either side of the same uncomfortable truth: reliability at the sharp end of this field is looking shakier than teams would like to admit, and Monza, with its punishing top speeds and kerbs, has a habit of finding every weakness a car has been hiding.
Pole Sitter Gasly and a Grid Reshuffled by Chaos
The retirements arrived against the backdrop of a qualifying session that had already turned Monza’s script upside down. Pierre Gasly claimed a stunning pole position, as covered in our qualifying report from Monza, beating George Russell by just 0.060 seconds. Russell and Toto Wolff both pointed the finger at Verstappen afterwards, accusing him of disrupting the tow chain ahead of the final runs, a claim explored in Russell’s post-qualifying comments.
Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton lined up on the second row for Ferrari’s home race, a result that briefly promised tifosi celebrations before Leclerc’s race ended in the barriers within the opening laps, an incident covered separately following the red flag caused by his heavy crash. Between Ferrari’s early drama and Aston Martin’s twin failures, Monza has delivered one of its messier afternoons in recent memory, and that is before anyone gets to totting up the grid penalties that reshuffled the start in the first place.
What This Says About Aston Martin’s Season
Zero points from either driver this season outside a stray finish or two tells its own story, and a double retirement at Monza will not help the mood in the garage. Fernando Alonso remains on 3 points for the year, Lance Stroll on none at all, and Aston Martin sit second from bottom of the constructors’ table with just 3 points to their name. A weekend like this one does not fix that. It just adds another data point to a season that already reads like a cautionary tale about promising too much and delivering too little.
Aston Martin will point to damage and hydraulics and move on, as teams always do. But when both cars fail to see the chequered flag at a circuit built for speed, the excuses start to wear thin, and the questions about what is actually wrong with this car will only get louder the longer the answers stay vague.
