Joe examines Alonso’s legacy in Formula 1 – a huge talent who should have achieved far more.
The news that Fernando Alonso is leaving Formula 1, which came in the middle of the summer break, is no great surprise. The 37-year-old Spanish driver, who has had 17 seasons in Formula 1, had only one choice left – McLaren. And he didn’t want to go on racing for the team. He felt it would be time wasted. He’s probably right in that respect, because there is a lot of work needed to get McLaren back to the front of the F1 pack and the team has been holding itself back in recent times with its nonsensical management structure. It might work in theory, in big companies, but racing teams are all about speed and accountability. You need people to be responsible for their sphere of influence and to have to answer to a boss.
Alonso clearly had no chance back at Ferrari, where he raced between 2010 and 2014, scoring 11 of his 32 victories. Red Bull was not interested, nor was Mercedes. Renault might have talked to him, but it’s building for the future and Fernando is too old to be part of that plan. And it’s hard to see why he would go anywhere else. The key point in all of this is that Alonso has a reputation for not being a team player, and for making the wrong choices when it comes to his future. At the start of his career, he was guided in a sensible fashion, spending a year learning at Minardi and then moving into the Renault factory team for the next five seasons – during which time he won his two World Championships, and won 15 races.
At that point, Alonso was seen as the future and it seemed as though he had the world at his feet. When he moved to McLaren at the start of 2007, he was 25 and up against the rookie Hamilton. And that was where it all started to go wrong. Hamilton was an unknown quantity and he quickly established himself, winning in Canada, in a race where Alonso seemed to lose his cool completely, running wide at the first corner and going off the track three more times at the same corner in the course of the afternoon. Afterwards he said that he felt that Hamilton had been ‘very lucky,’ which was rather delusional.
As the season went on, Alonso realized that he had met his match and found it hard to cope, culminating at the Hungarian Grand Prix where he deliberately blocked Hamilton in the pits in qualifying to stop the British driver getting a final run. That was underhand and the kind of behaviour that ruins reputations. What was going on behind closed doors at that race was even more alarming, as Fernando demanded number one status and tried to blackmail the team by threatening to go the FIA about data he had seen which had come from Ferrari. McLaren called his bluff and Alonso was lucky not to be fired that day, with Ron Dennis effectively writing him off as a McLaren driver from then on. Martin Whitmarsh managed to convince Dennis not to kick him out, but the damage was done. History relates that the two drivers finished equal on 109 points at the end of the year, beaten by Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen by one point. It was an ugly season in many ways, with the FIA and Ferrari politicking to stop McLaren winning the title – while the federation was forever stained at the end of the year when evidence emerged of Renault doing rather more espionage than McLaren and not being punished. It was clearly a personal thing between the then FIA President and Dennis.
At the end of the year, Alonso went back to Renault – hoping to take the team back to its winning ways. But, once again, there was drama and controversy with the infamous Singapore Grand Prix – when Alonso won after his team-mate Nelson Piquet Jr crashed at a very convenient moment and allowed Alonso to get into the lead. Many in the F1 paddock were very suspicious about what had happened, as Alonso’s early pit stop made no real sense from a strategy point of view.
A year later, Piquet spilled the beans having been kicked out of his drive. Renault imploded, which was a good thing as it meant that the conniving Flavio Briatore was thrown out of the sport. But Alonso somehow managed to avoid getting dragged into the scandal, for lack of any conclusive evidence that he had knowingly been involved. He was soon nicknamed ‘Teflonso,’ because nothing seemed to stick to him – but his card was marked once again. It was a shame, because he was clearly a huge talent and everyone wants a hero who is clean and not resorting to underhand tactics. As Renault fell apart at the end of 2009, Alonso jumped ship to Ferrari where he partnered Felipe Massa. But there was soon controversy again, over team orders at the German GP, where Massa was told to let Fernando pass. After that, it was always seen that Alonso had an unfair advantage at Ferrari. This did not help his reputation, but time cures many things and a lot of people forgot the less appealing side of his character. But, at the end of 2014, he terminated his Ferrari contract two years early – expecting there to be an auction for his services. He was then caught out, when Vettel was signed to replace him at Ferrari. Red Bull said no, Mercedes also declined to offer him a job, and that meant that his market value collapsed – as McLaren was then his only real choice left, and there was no need for the team to pay him excessive amounts of money.
The move came as McLaren’s performance dived with the arrival of Honda engines, and over the course of four seasons things have gone steadily downwards. It was hoped that a switch to Renault this year would stop the slide, but things have simply got worse.
So, Alonso leaves F1 with 32 victories, which puts him sixth overall in the all-time list, - but it’s still a long way behind his contemporaries, Lewis Hamilton (67 at the time of writing) and Sebastian Vettel (51).
If all goes to plan, he will end his F1 career with 312 starts, which will be 10 fewer than the record set by Rubens Barrichello, but ahead of Michael Schumacher and Jenson Button.
He will be remembered as a driver who should have achieved far more, given the talent he enjoyed, but who failed to live up to expectations because of poor management and some serious mistakes along the way.
Joe Saward has been covering Formula 1 full-time for 30 years. He has not missed a race since 1988.
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