Sun setting for Alonso
THERE is a paradox in the paddock. Tonight the bigwigs of Formula One will gather after dusk to raise a glass to a titan driver with two world championships to his name.
Further, Fernando Alonso merits inclusion in the top 10 ever proponents of the track. He was once the youngest champion and the youngest double champion in history. But for all he has achieved in 311 races, most people here in Abu Dhabi ahead of tomorrow’s grand prix by the harbour are shrugging their shoulders. Some even say good riddance.
Why the heckling where hosannas might have rung out? One reason is that the Spaniard has stayed on too long. That is true: he has won fewer points, 132, in four years at McLaren than Lewis Hamilton has notched in the last seven races.
Worse, his lack of success has turned him into a stuck record moaning about how the podium is a closed shop. Well, it depends who you are and for whom you are driving. His last top-three finish was at Ferrari back in 2014. McLaren’s milk float has left him podium-less in the last 84 races. He has not won for 109 races.
In typical enigmatic fashion, incidentally, he is not saying he is retiring from the top echelon. He mischievously keeps open the possibility of a return one day. There is no chance of that: he is 37, and nobody wants to give him a drive, as he found out when he tried to plot a route out of McLaren earlier this year, despite his claiming, again typically, that Red Bull had offered him a seat.
But back to history, which will record Alonso as a tainted champion. He was at the centre of the Spygate scandal in 2007, his email inbox a depository for the 780 pages of Ferrari information that McLaren people had purloined. He then threatened to make the deceit work for him by discrediting his boss Ron Dennis with whom he had fallen out amid his own fight with a rookie Lewis Hamilton. He left the team in the acrid fallout after one season and joined Ferrari. It was the single biggest tactical mistake of his life. Had he been calmer he may well have won the title in 2007, and 2008 was Hamilton’s year. Then, via a return to Renault, he went to Ferrari. He came close to championships in 2010 and 2012, and then it soured within the team, as it always did. He left for McLaren, under the new management of Martin Whitmarsh. He asked them to let him race at the Indianapolis 500, and they did. There, it must be said, he performed so magically that he is surely right in his belief that he would have won on his debut but for his engine conking out late on.
A super racer — 9.5 out of 10 in all aspects, with barely an off-day — he won titles in 2005 and 2006, outgunning Michael Schumacher, the man he nominated this weekend as the outstanding rival of his career. But Alonso’s title account closed at 25.
The biggest black mark remains his victory at the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix, achieved when Nelson Piquet was told to pervert the course of the race by crashing.
A police detective specialising in rumbling lying witnesses believed Alonso’s assertion that he was unaware of the plot. So that was that.