Do we like Fernando Alonso?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A clean record on harm and some real charity, but the search turned up thin on his views and there's the oil-sponsor backdrop.
Alonso comes from Oviedo in northern Spain. His dad loved motorsport and put him in a go-kart at about two, and by 1996 he had won the Junior Karting World Championship. A string of titles in the junior ranks followed, and in 2001 he made his F1 debut with Minardi under Flavio Briatore's management.
The drama in his career is mostly about who he fell out with rather than anything sinister. Back in 2022 he accused the Miami stewards of “incompetence” over a penalty, then shrugged when asked if he'd apologised to the FIA president. He described their chat as a “nice and friendly talk”. That's a hothead with a long memory, not a scandal.
On the harm check, I went looking for anything from him on LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants, vaccines or climate, and came up with nothing nasty in his own words. That's honestly thin rather than glowing, because he mostly keeps to racing. The one thing to sit uneasily with is that his team runs a big oil-company title sponsorship, which is the team's choice and not his words.
The good stuff is real. In April 2020 he donated 4,000 sets of protective equipment and 300,000 masks through UNICEF, where he is an ambassador, to help healthcare workers fighting the coronavirus.
As for now, he's 45 in a few months by the sporting calendar, and he is still turning up. He said he's “committed for the long term with this team” and that he'd treat every race like his last. Fans love that stubbornness, and nothing we found says it hides anything nasty.