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Is Fernando Alonso having a good Formula 1 season?
For the avoidance of doubt in regards to this writer's relationship with observable reality, the answer is yes.
Alonso has more than twice the points of his team-mate and would have Aston Martin fifth in the constructors' by himself. Any major mistakes have been kept to a minimum - his FP3 crash at Imola and collision with Zhou Guanyu in Austria seem to be just about it - and any minor mistakes could never be enough to have any influence on Aston's championship prospects.
The team's performances have obviously declined from their lofty heights of last year, but that is not on Alonso - who will hope Aston's anticipated infusion of Adrian Newey's know-how will help quickly reverse course.
OK, but... is Fernando Alonso having a good Formula 1 season by Fernando Alonso standards?
This is a different question altogether, given this is a driver for whom excellence - age-defying excellence, at that - is regarded as a baseline.
And if you feel that, given Aston's current predicament, the answer to that question is irrelevant, there is one person who doesn't seem to agree - that person being Fernando Alonso, who clearly has some interesting thoughts on the idea of his 2024 being a down year.
"I'm not super happy with the season from myself - but I'm much more happy than what the people think about the season of Fernando," said Alonso back at Zandvoort, launching into a lengthy answer that touched not only on his campaign but that of team-mate Lance Stroll and Stroll's status as a benchmark (supported by Stroll's previous record against Sebastian Vettel).
"I don't know what the people expect sometimes - when the car is [as it is], we've been fighting with the midfield teams recently, and I still have good points.
"I know people try to compare team-mates, Lance is doing a mega job this year but as I said already last year, he had some specific issues with the car that he fixed this year.
"He was at the same [lap]time as Vettel in the last year. And in 'one of my worst seasons' - [as it's being described] when I read sometimes some news - I have double [Lance's] points.
"I'm not sure how many drivers have double the points of their team-mate in any of the teams on the grid.
"Except that, I think we are very close this year. Less than half a tenth, I would say, up and down for Lance and myself.
"I'm not totally confident with the car. And this is slowing me down sometimes. And I need to get better, I know that, and I will try in these 10 races."
Alonso's assessment, combining a trademark pushback against media narratives with the admission that the year hasn't been totally up to his standards, reflects a campaign that has been difficult to parse - difficult to say anything about with any degree of confidence.
And the one-two punch of Zandvoort and Monza hasn't reframed it in a new light. At Zandvoort Stroll seemed to have something more in qualifying trim but couldn't string together the lap when it counted the most, while at Monza any comparison between the two was hindered by yellow flags in Q1.
In representative qualifying sessions (including sprint qualifying), Alonso is 13-3 up on Stroll this year, which as a headline score is fairly unimpeachable - a team's lead driver being ahead 80% of the time seems very much fair enough.
But the underlying gaps support a strengthening feeling that Stroll has been making Alonso's life more difficult over one lap.
Taking a theoretical 90-second lap, the gap between them was a veritable chasm last year - four tenths of a second.
That is not sustainable in modern F1, so you would have always expected Stroll to close that - but so far this season he has closed it to being under two tenths of a second. That's more like (though still bigger than) the advantage Vettel enjoyed over Stroll in the aforementioned 2022 season, Vettel's F1 swansong.
There's solid evidence that Vettel was a considerably diminished force over one lap by that point. So Alonso using that campaign to benchmark Stroll is probably less relevant than his other point, that Stroll was deceptively hamstrung by the peculiarities of the AMR23 relative to this year's version.
Stroll struggled with rear instability with the 2023 car - and though nobody at Aston Martin has exactly described the AMR24 as particularly compliant or consistent, the implication is that Stroll specifically has been less disadvantaged by it.
But it takes two to tango - if Driver B is suddenly running closer to Driver A, that doesn't necessarily equate only to Driver B making an improvement.
In terms of our observations, Alonso averaged position 6.6 in my colleague Edd Straw's driver rankings last year, while this year he is at 9.9. It is the biggest change for any driver who has been on the grid both years.
Yes, these are ordinal numbers so you don't really want to be doing arithmetic with them, and it's only the result of subjective analysis, but it is a relevant finding from a mass of weekend-to-weekend data that unmistakably aligns with the perception that the shine has come off a little relative to 2023.
Alonso's F1 legacy will be that of a better racer than a qualifier, which admittedly is a pretty funny thing to say about someone who's 'whitewashed' multiple team-mates in season qualifying head-to-heads during his F1 career.
But so much of the modern F1 weekend performance is qualifying-conditioned that any shortcoming there isn't something you can consistently overcome. For a useful example of that, see the season being put together by Alonso's fellow F1 veteran Lewis Hamilton.
Hamilton has taken a step back over one lap compared to team-mate George Russell and while that hasn't stopped him from being ahead of Russell in the standings anyway, it's obviously a limitation. He would not be as frustrated about it if it wasn't. He would not say that "maybe they get that with Kimi" - they being Mercedes, that being qualifying excellence and Kimi being Hamilton's successor, Kimi Antonelli - if that side of it didn't matter so much.
The reason his suggestion isn't ludicrous isn't that Antonelli's qualifying ceiling is higher than Hamilton's (F1's most prolific qualifier ever) but that one is 18 and the other is 39. When it comes to superstars, one-lap pace seems to be, generally, the first thing to be lost going into the twilight of an F1 career, just like excellence at stint management is the last thing to be gained.
Alonso has defied his age, but in any F1 campaign that has to be tested again. He is not failing that test right now, far from it - but it is hardly sacrilege to wonder whether a key part of his arsenal is declining as you would expect it to.
Except, of course, there's another possible explanation.
In Alonso's 'second' F1 career, when you look at the single-lap comparison, it's arguably not this year that's the outlier. Alonso wasn't exactly dominating Esteban Ocon at Alpine - so you could say it is last year's demolition of Stroll that is, in fact, the trend-breaker. Your mileage on that may vary depending on how you view Ocon relative to Stroll, but it is impossible not to bring up that Alonso's most potent season has been the one where he's had by far the best car.
On a wider scale, Alonso has nothing to prove, no 'stock' to worry about. The only thing that's relevant is what's being achieved. Only he'll know whether he's at 90%, 95%, 98%, 99%, 100% right now - but in terms of where Aston Martin is right now, it's fair to wonder whether each and every of those numbers comes out to broadly the same result at the end of the season.
If he's keeping something in reserve, consciously or subconsciously, he's well-entitled to. Only a better Aston Martin will allow for that hypothesis to be properly tested.
