F1 BLOG

Well, It looks like McLaren and Lewis Hamilton are off to a good start. With Lewis on the pole and his teammate just behind it looks like a good starting position for the first race of the 2008 season.

Will Lewis shine again this season without Fernando Alonso on his team? Only time will tell, but it looks like things are off to a great start for McLaren this year. I guess we’ll just have to see how the race goes tomorrow.

BMW is looking very strong too, perhaps it will be at least a 3 way challenge this year.

After completing the first round of testing in the new 2008 F1 Car, the MP4-23, Lewis seems very positive about the new car. With this season removing some driver aids like traction control it will be interesting to see if Lewis has the raw talent to keep up his amazing performance.

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.

ITV is reporting that their viewership for the end of the last F1 race hit 4.7 Million viewers. This figure means that 48 Percent of the entire available viewing audience was watching Lewis Hamilton race.

This is a staggering number and really shows how Lewis Hamilton has pulled in the U.K. fans. While there seems to be no shortage of opinion on how good or evil Lewis Hamilton is, no one can deny that he has done wonders for the sport/business of F1 in England.

Now if only we could find another great Canadian 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.