Alonso says the back of the grid is weak. The standings cannot settle it

Fernando Alonso found a target in Austin, and then he widened it. After the US Grand Prix he said the bottom third of the grid is very low in driver quality, and that Aston Martin needs to start higher up to get away from it. The claim deserves a test, and the first result is awkward for the man making it.

What he said, and why

The remark followed a first-lap collision with Alex Albon of Williams. Alonso said Albon forgot the corner was there and had to turn left. The stewards gave no penalty. Alonso called it Aston Martin's best race of the year for competitiveness and said ninth or tenth was possible on merit. He finished 16th. The insult to the back of the field came from a driver whose afternoon had just been wrecked, which is worth remembering before treating it as a considered ranking.

What the points table says

The standings give the claim some support. Yuki Tsunoda has 1 point. Lance Stroll and Valtteri Bottas each have 0 points. Three experienced drivers with almost nothing to show after a full season of races looks like a damning list.

It does not prove Alonso's case. Points measure the car first and the driver second. A driver in the slowest machine on the grid can be the best in the field and still finish outside the top ten every week, because the scoring stops at tenth. A table that is mostly zeros at the bottom tells you who has a slow car or bad luck, and very little about who lacks talent.

The test Alonso set himself

The cleaner test is the teammate comparison, because two drivers in one car remove the machinery from the argument. Stroll sits in the other Aston Martin, a car Alonso says is not yet fast enough to reach the points on a normal day. If the bottom third is full of weak drivers, then Aston Martin, a team Alonso is part of, belongs in that sentence. He can argue that he is the exception, and his results over a long career give him standing to say so. He cannot claim the field is weak while sitting in it and leaving his own car out of the count.

There is also a simple problem with the word bottom. The back of the grid changes with every rule set. A new technical formula tends to spread the cars out in the first season, so drivers who looked fine in a close midfield can look poor in a car that is a second off. The rules change the picture of the drivers as much as they change the cars. The list of low scorers this year is partly a list of teams that guessed wrong on the new regulations.

Verdict

Alonso is right that the back of the grid is scoring almost nothing. He has not shown that the drivers there are worse than the men who filled those seats before, and the standings alone cannot show it. A fair answer needs the teammate gaps, season by season, with the cars held constant. Until a driver beats a teammate in the same machine by a clear margin, a zero in the points column says more about the garage than about the person in the cockpit.

Alonso, 16th in Austin, is now part of the evidence he wanted to dismiss.