Alonso's 'missing' F1 races as he reaches landmark 400 grands prix

The 2024 Mexico City Grand Prix will be the 1,121st world championship event in F1 history - and for the first time, there will be a quadruple centurion on the grid. 

Fernando Alonso is set to enter his 400th grand prix - the first driver to reach that extraordinary figure, with Lewis Hamilton set to take part in his 352nd. 

It means Alonso will have entered 35.68% of ALL world championship grands prix since the 1950 British Grand Prix kicked things off in May of that year. 

But, it is not his 400th start however. Should he take to the starting grid in Mexico, it will be his 397th start with the landmark 400th actual start coming in the penultimate round in Qatar. 

So, what are these three 'missing' grands prix in Alonso's career - one that has seen him race 21,578 laps or 107,951km or 67,077 miles. In other words, that's 2.69 times around the circumference of planet Earth. 

Fernando Alonso's missing F1 races

This list does not include the races Alonso was not entered into for injury reasons as the 2015 Australian GP he missed for McLaren having sustained a concussion in that mysterious testing accident in Barcelona.

Likewise, the 2016 Bahrain GP that he skipped when suffering from a rib injury after his massive accident in Australia. 

It also does not count the 2017 Monaco Grand Prix he skipped to moonlight at the Indianapolis 500. It only counts those races where Alonso entered but did not take to the start. 

The first missing race is the 2001 Belgian GP, in Alonso's rookie season when he was driving for Minardi. 

He actually did take to the start at Spa, but a massive accident on lap five for Luciano Burti burying himself at nearly 200mph into the Blanchimont tyre wall prompted a red flag. 

The race itself was then restarted from new, but the Minardi had suffered a gearbox failure in the delay, and so Alonso's record for that race is officially a Did Not Start.

Alonso then skipped the entire 2002 season to put the miles in as Renault test driver, coming back in 2003 - and by '05 was in championship contention as the Michael Schumacher era shattered.

The Renault R25 was a potent V10 weapon, but at Indianapolis, its Michelin tyres proved not to be adequate. This was the infamous six-car race that shredded F1 tyres in the United States as the diamond-cut track was destroying the Michelin rubber through the banked Turn 13 - the Oval's Turn 1.

As a result, it was decided that all Michelin runners would withdraw at the end of the formation lap. To date, this is also the only race that Red Bull entered but did not start, and is the last one to have been missed by both McLaren and Williams - all three Michelin runners.

The third and final missing race from Alonso's back-catalogue is the 2017 Russian Grand Prix.

Much like Sebastian Vettel in that Bahrain 2016 event mentioned earlier, Alonso took to the start of the formation lap, and like his old mucker, conked out on the formation lap, leading to a DNS.

The McLaren-Honda machine had suffered yet another failure, leaving Alonso stranded within sights of the pit-lane as he then proceeded to abandon his car. 

As an aside, that DNS for Vettel in Bahrain 2016 meant he was entered into exactly 300 grands prix, drove 299.5 formation laps and only raced 299 times in F1.