Double World Champion Fernando Alonso might want to look away at a recent statistic, with the Spaniard having retired from more races in the turbo-hybrid era than any other driver.
Since the hybrid era began in 2014, luck hasn’t been on the 41-year-old’s side, with the Spanish driver having raced for some of the worst sides when it comes to reliability.
Alonso has remarkably retired from 40 races since the hybrid era was introduced nine years ago, with the Spanish driver having not even competed in the sport in 2019 and 2020.
Whilst five of his DNFs came in 2022 as a result of Alpine’s unreliable power unit, the bulk of his retirements came thanks to his second stint at McLaren.
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Of course, Alonso’s return to McLaren in 2015 was a move which saw the veteran decide to leave the sport at the end of 2018, after likening the team’s Honda power unit to a “GP2 engine”.
GP2 was the former name of the Formula 2 series, making his criticism of Honda’s power unit particularly painful for the Japanese manufacturer to hear presumably.
From 2015-2018, Alonso retired from 23 races, was ruled out of two on medical grounds, failed to start one and missed one to compete in the Indy 500.
With this in mind, the bulk of his DNFs came whilst at McLaren, with the Spaniard having retired from five more races than Romain Grosjean, who is second on the ‘Most DNFs’ list since 2014.
Third on the list is Carlos Sainz, with the Ferrari driver having retired from 33 races since the hybrid era was introduced.
Astonishingly, 17 of his 33 DNFs came whilst racing for Toro Rosso (known now as AlphaTauri) from 2015 to the 2017 US Grand Prix, where he switched to Renault.
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Just outside the top three on the list is double World Champion Max Verstappen, with the Dutchman having endured 31 DNFs since 2015.
The Dutchman retired from 14 races in his first three years alone in F1, with five having occurred whilst at Toro Rosso, with the other nine taking place whilst driving for Red Bull.
Other key names to feature on the list are Daniel Ricciardo, who is joint-fifth on the list having retired from 29 races, and Sebastian Vettel, who is eighth, with 23 retirements to his name.