I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Fernando Alonso and Taylor Swift are not dating. Sure, there’s plenty of rumor and speculation around the happy not-couple, but none of it’s true. It’s not even that the rumor is wrong—the rumor is fake, nothing more than a fun bit of imagination from the folks over on Tumblr.
As a former Tumblr girlie myself, it’s my solemn duty to ruin F1mblr’s bit of fun. The site’s approach to real people has always been a bit interesting—just ask Misha Collins—and the Taylonso drama is another example of fans shipping real people. What started as a fun what-if got out of hand, and now the entire world is reporting on this as if Swift is really Alonso’s weed-smoking girlfriend.
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You may not expect a heavy Formula 1 fandom on Tumblr, but you’d be surprised. F1mblr is a highly active corner of the site, full of blogs with titles like “cyril’s ass tattoo” and “My life is as messy as a Ferrari race strategy.” They take a typically Tumblr approach to the world of top-tier racing: Jokes, fanart, and—of course—shipping.
That latter category is the one we’re dealing with here. Shipping is the fine art of putting two characters or people into a relationship, exploring the dynamics of their hypothetical interaction as a couple and supporting the pairing, and Tumblr will do it to anything. This is a website that was once held hostage by fanart of a Dr. Seuss character in various relationships with alternate versions of himself—when you’re used to that, shipping real people suddenly seems boring.
So when two Tumblr-popular celebrities break up with their significant others at the same time, the shippers will come out. For Swift and Alonso, they mostly did so as a joke—pairing these two famous people who, as far as anyone knows, may possibly have briefly met at some point in their lives. Then the joke was submitted as a real rumor to gossip outlet Deuxmoi, and the articles started pouring in.
The Sun, The Mirror, Page Six, all the outlets primed for celebrity gossip jumped on the “rumor” from Deuxmoi. Road and Track wrote it up multiple times, and even The Drive got in on it. It’s a fun pairing to imagine, a neat relationship to explore the dynamics of. In other words: A good ship.
F1mblr’s reaction, of course, was raucous laughter that all these established publications took their little joke seriously. But the joke got even better once Fernando Alonso himself started joining in—posting TikToks using Swift’s music, and shouting out her discography in the comments.
The ship, while fun, is fake. Alonso’s TikTok trolling doesn’t change that. But who knows? With the amount of media attention the pairing has gotten, maybe the two will really hit it off. Celebrity romance is never more than a DM slide away, and sometimes meet-cutes happen in unexpected ways. If Swift and Alonso get together now, they could even go public with their relationship on the ninth anniversary of DashCon.