BONUS: Driving Style Secrets - Fernando Alonso's remarkable technique explained

The Race F1 Podcast

The Race Media Ltd

Sports

4.5 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 11 April 2026

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We've got another bonus episode for you this week - the first episode of Season 3 of Driving Style Secrets, the podcast that takes an unapologetically deep dive into the driving techniques of the biggest names in F1, made exclusively for The Race Members' Club on Patreon.

This season, we're focusing on 21st Century Greats, and who better to kick off with than a driver who has been an almost ever present in F1 this century - Fernando Alonso.

Hosts Edd Straw and Mark Hughes have spent countless hours watching the Spaniard trackside, observing him over thousands of laps in many generations of machinery. Between them, they explain the techniques that have made Alonso such a formidable - and unique - competitor for over two decades at the highest level.

The rest of Season 3, including episodes on Kimi Raikkonen, Jenson Button, Sebastian Vettel and Nico Rosberg, plus an exclusive Q&A episode, will only be available to The Race Members' Club. So if you enjoy this episode - and we're confident you will - head to Patreon.com/therace to sign up today.

Members also have access to our two previous seasons of Driving Style Secrets, which covered Modern Greats (Verstappen, Norris, Hamilton, Leclerc, Russell and Piastri) and Legends of the Nineties (Senna, Prost, Mansell, Schumacher and Hakkinen), plus two exclusive Q&A episodes where Edd and Mark tackled questions from listeners about driving technique.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Accelerating, braking, cornering.
0:07.0	Superficially, these are the core fundamentals of driving an F1 car, but it's how these elements and countless more are weave together that separates the great drivers from the merely very good.
0:20.0	Welcome to driving Style Secrets.
0:28.5	Hello and welcome to Driving Style Secrets,
0:31.0	where we take an unapologetically deep dive
0:33.2	into the techniques of Formula One's greatest drivers.
1:11.7	Now, if you're new to the Race Members Club or you're listening to this episode in our F1 podcast feed or watching on YouTube, we've already made two seasons of this show. So this is our third year. Those are all exclusively for members. And we urge you to check those out if you haven't already. Now, in the first series, we covered the modern greats, so Vostappen, Norris, Hamilton, Leclerc, Russell and Piastri, then season two, we moved on to Legends of the 90s, so Senna, Prost, Mansel, Schumacher, and Hakenon. So season three, this series will only be available on the Race Members Club, with the exception of this first episode. We're kind of bridging the gap between those two eras. So we're going to talk about 21st century great. And we're going to start off
1:17.5	with a driver who ticks that box in so many ways. He's raced in 23 out of 27 seasons in the 21st
1:24.8	century. Still going strong, Fernando Alonso. I'm Ed Straw. Joining me is Mark Hughes,
1:30.4	my regular partner in crime for this series. You've probably written more about driving styles
1:35.2	than any F1 journalist. I'm probably not far, well, maybe a long way behind on the league table,
1:41.2	but not too bad in terms of ranking, giving me another couple of decades.
1:46.5	But, yeah, and obviously you've raced extensively as well in the distant past.
1:51.1	Yeah, not at that level, but yeah, the laws of physics are the same.
1:54.7	And, yeah, you sort of get some sort of insight into what drivers are talking about.
1:59.7	And when you're observing them,
2:01.0	you sort of get a good inkling of what they're trying to do with the car.
2:05.2	Absolutely, yeah. It's not the same, but it is the same, the kind of amateur driving career.
2:12.2	So, episode one, we normally get into our foundational arguments and that kind of thing.
2:19.4	But it is really important because when we're talking about driving styles,
2:22.8	it's important to understand that these aren't absolutes that we're talking about here.
2:28.0	It's a broad toolkit to understand what drivers are doing or might do or tend towards.
	...

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