More on Alonso & McLaren

A few days ago, I noted that Alonso’s threatening of his team boss was a grave misjudgement on Alonso’s part. Anyone with a modicum of knowledge about McLaren (and, in particular, Ron Dennis) would know before they started that it was a futile and ultimately pointless effort by Alonso.

It now seems that Alonso and Dennis are no longer on speaking terms; indeed, they haven’t been since the Hungary debacle (when Alonso was found guilty of impeding team mate Hamilton during final qualifying, thereby ensuring Hamilton couldn’t get another lap in and leaving Alonso free to run to pole position) back in August.

Historically, when a team boss and driver are no longer speaking it doesn’t bode well for the relationship. Think of Prost and Alesi in 2001.

So where does that leave the Alonso/McLaren relationship? Can they continue after this? I think it highly unlikely. The facts, as they have recently emerged, are:

• Alonso did threaten his team boss.
• Alonso felt his status as World Champion should mean McLaren focussed their efforts on him, to the detriment of his team mate. Ron Dennis disagreed.
• Ron Dennis demonstrated his integrity by going straight to the FIA as soon as he had knowledge of the extra evidence Alonso threatened him with (thereby effectively calling Alonso’s bluff).
• When asked by the team to attend the FIA hearing in September, Alonso refused, prompting Ron Dennis to label him “…a remarkable recluse for a driver.”
• Alonso was in possession of crucial evidence in the ‘spygate’ scandal yet didn’t notify Ron Dennis immediately.

The last point is also true of Pedro de la Rosa, McLaren’s test driver. I wouldn’t be surprised if, as a result, de la Rosa was shown the door.

Also questionable is how much effort the team are now prepared to put into engineering Alonso to a championship: he’s already proved he thinks he’s above the team, we’ve had revelations that he’s offered money (out of his own pocket) to his mechanics to ensure he beats Hamilton, so surely he can’t expect any preferential treatment now?

It all smacks somewhat of an insecure driver who has been rattled by a rookie.

So all this leaves the burning question: will Alonso be sitting in a McLaren next year?

My guess is that he won’t. He’ll either go back to Renault (who have failed to maintain their competitiveness since Alonso departed) or he’ll sign for Ferrari.

How better to poke Ron Dennis in the eye one last time?

Some Quick Thoughts on the F1 Spy Scandal & McLaren in General

• Do we know why Nigel Stepney decided to give Ferrari secrets away?
• If de la Rosa and Alonso knew they had incriminating evidence, why did they not tell their team boss sooner?
• Interesting that Hamilton is now openly criticising Alonso’s driving tactics and his no-show at the Paris hearing

These are likely to be added to throughout the day…

Taxi for Alonso

So, the F1 spy scandal has reached a conclusion: for McLaren, a somewhat expensive one. For Ferrari, it’s still too soft.

This all follows new evidence that came to light implicating that McLaren did indeed use sensitive Ferrari data to their advantage. The evidence was submitted in the form of emails between de la Rosa (McLaren’s tester) and Alonso referencing sensitive Ferrari data that came from Mike Coughlan (via Nigel Stepney at Ferrari).

How this evidence came to light is more interesting: Alonso is alleged to have threatened Ron Dennis that, unless Ron made Alonso team leader, he’d show the emails to the FIA. (At the time, Ron claims he knew nothing of the emails and, given his widely publicised integrity, you’d be inclined to believe him.)

Ron then phoned the FIA to inform them of the emails, the FIA then asked the drivers for their full co-operation and the emails were disclosed. The rest is history.

Now, this is all based on rumour and conjecture: nobody is confirming the claims but, interestingly, nobody is exactly denying them either. The best we’ve had is from Alonso’s manager, Luis Garcia Abad:

When asked about the stories of Alonso threatening to reveal the email exchange to the FIA, Abad said: “It’s not true, and it’s not possible. The facts say it is not true because it happened in a different way.”

It’d be interesting to hear what those facts are and how it did happen. If your driver is accused of something as heinous as this, surely you’d issue a swift and thorough rejection?

Ron Dennis won’t confirm what was said between himself and Alonso, but he does say they spoke and that Alonso was “pretty upset by many things”:

“Fernando arrived, pretty upset by many things. I’m not going to give you the detail,” said Dennis.

“In a conversation that took place he said ‘I have something in my e-mail system which is from one of your engineers’.”

If Alonso really did threaten his team boss, then he seriously misjudged Ron Dennis. Anyone with an iota of knowledge about the history of McLaren knows that Ron doesn’t favour drivers: there has never been a ‘no 1′ McLaren driver.

You also have to question Alonso’s motivation: is he really that rattled by Hamilton that he’s prepared to blackmail his own team boss? And, according to one British paper today, prepared to offer his mechanics £650 each to help him beat Hamilton?

Now, Alonso is a double world champion. No mean feat, especially when you remember he beat a certain M Schumacher twice to get those titles. To become a world champion requires certain levels of tenacity, selfishness and ruthlessness.

But these are generally aimed at your competitors, not your own team. If the rumours are true, Alonso has seriously misjudged the situation and, more tellingly, his own standing with McLaren.

The First Since 1996 (Damon and All That)

He did it: Hamilton’s on pole for tomorrow’s British GP.

Given the pace of the Ferrari throughout practice and Alonso’s during qualifying, this surprised me.

Good stuff. Ruined only slightly, as ever, by James ‘The Cock’ Allen attempting to feign excitement.

Elsewhere:

• Alonso and Hamilton could face action if McLaren have been naughty
• Toro Rosso are looking at new drivers (incredibly, Ralf Schumacher was rumoured to be one of them)
• Good ol’ Muzza Walker is back behind the mic for some trousers-on-fire commentary in Germany

Now be off with you. Go do Facebook or something.

RTL Reconstruct Kubica’s Canada Crash

German TV channel RTL have made a computer reconstruction of Robert Kubica’s crash in Montreal the other weekend.

(The link is a Quicktime movie).

The video highlights the various safety devices working during the high-speed accident.

Here’s the actual accident:

The Divorce of Stepney and Ferrari

Nigel Stepney has told the Sunday Times that he’s done nothing wrong and the allegations levelled at him are part of a “dirty tricks campaign”.

Lest we forget, Ferrari have lodged “an official complaint about his behaviour” to the relevant Italian authorities.

This story confused and surprised me when I first read it (Stepney’s been with the Scuderia since 1992) but it now seems inevitable that the relationship between Ferrari and Stepney is beyond repair. Unless the ‘dirty tricks’ quip relates to another team? Who knows.

The prospect of turning around Honda’s dire season must seem ever more attractive…

UPDATE: Ferrari have dismissed Nigel Stepney.

Red Bull Launch RB3

Red Bull launched their 2007 challenger today, and Adrian Newey is hopeful of a good year.

I agree with Adrian — it does most certainly look ‘McLaren-esque’. But whilst I broadly agree that three years of stable regulations are bound to produce similar cars up and down the grid, when he says that this design is ‘evolutionary’ I disagree.

Compare the 2006 RB2 to the new 2007 RB3.

Alright, looks aren’t everything — there’s a hell of a lot of engineering under the skin that we can’t see that may have been carried over. But it’s clear that the aerodynamics are radically different, the sculpting around the rear of the car is much tighter, the nose, front wing, rear wing, engine cover…

A good test would be to strip the two cars of their livery and sit them side by side. Then we’d see how re/evolutionary the design is.

It’d be also interesting to put an MP4-21 next to it.

Having said that, I think Red Bull are going to go very well this year.

FIA Confirms 2007 Entry List

The FIA have released the 2007 FIA Formula One World Championship entry list.

There’s a bit to take in — new sponsorship deals for McLaren (Vodafone), Renault (ING) and Williams (AT&T); a few rookies in top teams (Hamilton, Kovalainen) and the positioning of the drivers within teams. For example, I find it interesting to see Massa as no. 5 and Raikkonen as no.6 at Ferrari.

Looking down the list, it appears that teams give the first number to their longest serving driver (true of Renault, Ferrari, Honda, BMW, Red Bull, Williams, Spyker and Super Aguri).

In fact, only Honda and Toyota are the only teams with an unchanged lineup (OK, so BMW ran Kubica from Germany onwards last year, but they started with Villeneuve. Spyker haven’t confirmed their second seat yet, so it could go to Monteiro — which would also add them to this list).

I’m just looking forward to seeing how the respective graphics departments have done with the new colour schemes (McLaren = grey/black — Vodafone = red | Renault = yellow — ING = orange). An unenviable task!

Formula One — The Great Design Race @ the Design Museum

The Design Museum is currently running an F1 exhibition called Formula One — The Great Design Race. I visited it yesterday and can wholeheartedly recommend it.

Yes, there are classic and modern F1 cars on show but for me the real gem of the exhibition was the on-board video footage through the ages–they’ve got on-board footage of Fangio, Senna and Stewart at great tracks such as Monaco and the old Nurburgring. What amazed me was the amount of slide Fangio and Stewart had to cope with: compared to modern-day F1, those cars slid around a lot!

The Nurburgring piece is truly amazing: it’s the first footage of the old 14.2 mile circuit I’ve ever seen and it was just amazing: cars skimming past trees and fields at 170 mph plus, the car leaping over crests, sliding all over the place, stark camber changes–it really is a great piece of footage.

If you’re in London and fancy a view, it runs until 29th October and costs only £7.

What Made Montoya Turn His Back on F1?

Juan Pablo Montoya has announced that he’s leaving F1 at the end of the season to race in the American Nascar series. This is serious news.

Montoya has the credentials to justify his presence in F1: 7 wins, 30 podiums, 13 pole positions and 3rd place finishes in the F1 World Championship (in 2002 and 2003). On paper, this looks like a man who belongs in F1. The fact he’s leaving can only be for one of two reasons: he’s either become disillusioned with the whole F1 circus, or he was left without a competitive seat in 2007 — it’s no secret that Montoya’s McLaren contract expires at the end of 2006, and some might argue that he’s the wrong side of 30 to be getting another shot with a top team.

Montoya and McLaren haven’t gelled, for whatever reason. The McLaren MP4-21 is an understeering beast, a trait JPM dispises, and whilst Raikkonen made the best of the MP4-21 last season on his way to winning 7 races, Montoya managed just three wins and 72 fewer points than Kimi.

So earlier in the year when contracts for 2007 and beyond were being discussed, many thought Montoya was heading out of McLaren (to be replaced by Alonso) perhaps ending up at Red Bull or Toyota. Montoya himself said nothing of his contractual situation, save that he ‘had numerous options’ to stay in F1.

I doubt that many people thought he would actually leave F1 though. Sure, there was speculation that he may hook up with Chip Ganassi (with whom he won his Indy 500 and CART titles) in IndyCar, and Nigel Roebuck hinted in his weekly column a week or so ago that NASCAR might appeal to JPM, but few actually thought a driver of Montoya’s calibre would be allowed to slip out of F1 without a competitive drive.

When asked by Autosport “What was the final straw in leaving Formula One and how did you justify taking a pay cut?” Montoya responded thus:

“I don’t think you’re going to be happy getting more money and being miserable all day. When I called Chip I said, ‘Chip you know what. I want to come back racing, and I think the best place to do racing is here (NASCAR).

“It’s not how many millions you’re making or how much money you’re making. It’s a matter of three years down the line are you going to be excited about what you’re doing or not. I think three years from now when I look at my career I’m going to be happier here.”

Which seems to explain why Montoya is going to NASCAR: he’s bored with F1. It’s a total travesty that someone of Montoya’s calibre should be allowed to leave in this fashion when a driver such as Ralf Schumacher is paid $stupid for crashing, moaning a lot and generally not being very good.