Formula 1 BLOG

It’s official. Fernando Alonso will be driving for Renault in 2008. Fernando seems pleased to be returning to his old team. I wonder how much of that is happy memories with his two back to back championships with the team?

If Renault is not competitive next year it will be interesting to see how far into the season we get before Alonso begins to whine about something?

If Renault doesn’t put a very competitive car on the track next season I think they are in for a world of grief.

Ron Dennis of McLaren has confirmed that he and Fernando Alonso are not speaking. It looks like it all stems from a heated discussion where Alonso said he had info that could hurt McLaren and if he didn’t get treated as the top driver then maybe he would use it to hurt the team.

Ron says that Alonso later retracted this threat but from what I can see in the end it was the Alonso emails that cost the McLaren team all it’s points this year and also cost them $100 Million dollars.

It’s looking more and more to me like Fernando Alonso can’t quite deal with the fact that his team mate Lewis Hamilton may be new to F1 but has a level of skill so high that McLaren can’t legitimately put one driver before the other.

If Alonso can’t deal with both drivers being treated equally and has to resort to childish tantrums then perhaps he needs to go join a team like spyker where he can be clearly the number one driver.

Speculation and rumors are flying that Alonso may leave McLaren at the end of the season. After this weekend’s events and reports that Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso are not speaking to each other it is clear that Alonso is really not happy.

Alonso is under contract until 2008 with McLaren but tensions in the McLaren team are clearly running very high at this point. When asked by the Spanish media if he would be staying with the team until the end of his contract Alonso’s reply was simply “I don’t know”.

When the question was put to McLaren team boss Ron Dennis he stated that this sort of speculation is inevitable but that McLaren will honour its contracts with the drivers and he hopes that the drivers would do the same.

The Renault team has said they would love to have the world champion Alonso back. I think Fernando would be unlikely to return to Renault with their current level of performance and I hope that both Lewis and Fernando can work through their differences and get on with making McLaren the best team it can be.

Lewis Hamilton held off Kimi and his Ferrari in the last 12 laps of the Hungarian GP to take his 3rd win of the season. Hamilton increased his points lead over team mate Fernando Alonso to 7 points after Alonso was moved back to 6th on the grid for the pit lane fiasco during the third qualifying session.

Hopefully the two McLaren drivers can put this weekend’s problems behind them and get on with the rest of the season.

It looks like Fernando Alonso has been taking lessons from Michael Schumacher. In a disgusting display of poor sportsmanship it appears that Fernando and his crew deliberately held up Lewis Hamilton to prevent him turning his final fast lap in qualifying.

Ron Dennis appeared livid as he saw this sad event take place, snatching the headphones from Alonso’s pit board man and marching him down pit lane it was clear he was extremely angry.

Lewis Hamilton had been clearly fastest throughout qualifying and it looks like Fernando decided that the only way to get pole was to prevent Lewis from getting his fast lap.

This kind of behaviour reminds me of a certain Ferrari driver of times past and I have personally lost a huge amount of respect for Mr. Alonso after this incident and I applaud Lewis for his typical low key, let the facts speak for themselves attitude during the post quali interviews.

Fernando, I hope you are ashamed of yourself for this pathetic behaviour.