F1 INSIDER
Could Fernando Alonso really return to Ferrari?
Fernando Alonso may not even have been to a Formula 1 race since his pre-test appearance at the Bahrain Grand Prix, but he could yet play a role in this year’s driver-market silly season. Most extraordinary of all is that a return to Ferrari – the team he quit in rancorous circumstances five years ago – isn’t out of the question.
Alonso has kept a low profile since a whirlwind few weeks in May and June when he failed to qualify for the Indy 500 and then won Le Mans after some late-race heartbreak for his Toyota team-mates. Since then he has been pondering his next move. All the indications are that he’s waiting to see how the F1 market shakes out.
One thing is certain, though: he won’t be racing for Mclaren. The progress the team has made, and the way Carlos Sainz and Lando Norris have gelled together, left new team principal Andreas Seidl convinced the most
prudent course of action was to retain the pair for next season.
While Alonso retains contractual links to Mclaren through being an ambassador, the team is explicit he will not even test for it again, and if Alonso wanted to race elsewhere then it won’t stand in his way.
Mclaren CEO Zak Brown said recently: “We’re happy for him, if he wants to get back into F1 – because we don’t have a seat available – to go race for another team. We’d very much support ZAK BROWN him in that if that’s what he wants to do.” Indeed, it is something Alonso is looking at. Insiders say his representatives have been sounding out a number of teams regarding 2020, even though he's said "what F1 can offer me on a personal level is not attractive enough". Alonso would only be interested in a race-winning car, so that narrows his choices to Mercedes, Red Bull and Ferrari.
Mercedes seems a closed door, even though the team has not yet settled on who will be Lewis Hamilton’s teammate in 2020. Valtteri Bottas’s strong start to 2019 has left him favourite to be retained. If he doesn’t do the job, the team will slot in reserve Esteban Ocon. Mercedes boss Toto Wolff is very relaxed about the situation.
“Valtteri said to me last year that he has no problem with the one-year extensions, although he doesn’t like them,” Wolf said. “I think Valtteri merits a seat in F1 and he knows it’s down to him and his performances, and we like him very much.
“The first quarter of the season was very strong. He just needs to just pick up the bag and continue to perform like he did, and this is what we both – him and us – agree on.”
With no room at Mercedes for Alonso, Red Bull doesn’t seem to be an opening either. The team is reluctant to consider him because it doesn’t want to risk any political upheaval that could upset Max Verstappen. That then leaves Ferrari, which on paper appears to have no opening because Sebastian Vettel and Charles Leclerc are both
WE’RE HAPPY FOR HIM, IF HE WANTS TO GET BACK INTO F1 – BECAUSE WE DON’T HAVE A SEAT AVAILABLE – TO GO RACE FOR ANOTHER TEAM. WE’D VERY MUCH SUPPORT HIM IN THAT IF THAT’S WHAT HE WANTS TO DO
under contract for 2020. But Vettel’s self-confessed ‘difficult’ campaign has prompted speculation he may walk at the end of this year. Insiders have told F1 Racing he has been exploring his options with a number of rival teams.
Whether such contact is just about gaining knowledge of how the land lies, or if he is serious about moving on, only he will know. What Vettel does is key not just for Alonso, who would be an obvious candidate to slot in at Maranello for one year, but for elsewhere.
Vettel’s strongest ties are with Red Bull. In the unlikely event he returns there, that closes off a promotion for Daniil Kvyat – or a switch for Nico Hülkenberg, who could find himself on the market if Renault goes for Ocon.
Ocon’s other obvious options are at Williams and Racing Point, but it isn’t definite that he needs to maintain Mercedes affiliation. Wolff is clear that if Ocon’s career rests on him cutting some ties, then it will need to be done.
That means a potential seat for Ocon at Haas, since the future of Romain Grosjean is in doubt after a difficult start to the campaign. But the name most being linked to Haas is Sergio Perez, who was in discussions with the team last year and may feel his career could do with a change.
F1 COMMITS TO GROUND EFFECT
Formula 1 is set to readopt an aerodynamic philosophy banned in the early 1980s in bid to shake up the sport and improve the racing.
While discussions between teams, the FIA and F1 owners Liberty Media are ongoing regarding the final details of new technical rules for 2021, a broad outline concept has been agreed.
The key to this concept is a fundamental change in the way that downforce is created on the car. F1’s chiefs have
realised the way the current cars work, with complicated and finely optimised wings and bargeboards managing airflow, is detrimental to racing because they cannot follow each other closely enough.
Instead, there is going to be more emphasis on ‘ground effect’ through the use of underfloor venturi and a large diffuser to achieve similar amounts of downforce. More crucially, going down this route should help allow cars to get much closer to each other.
FIA head of single-seater matters Nikolas Tombazis said: “We want to make it more possible for cars to race and follow each other and to have more exciting battles. We want to have tyres that enable people to fight each other without degrading or only giving a short interval for the person attacking to attack.
“They are simpler than the current cars because a lot of the small components have been removed, especially in front of the sidepods, and the front wings are simpler.
“There is a diffuser going right under the car – a venturitype channel. There are tunnels under the sidepods from the front to the back.”
Current predictions are for cars to go from losing around 45% of downforce when they are two car lengths behind – as they do at the moment – to just 5-10%.
Tombazis added: “Two strong vortices [coming off the rear wing] suck in a lot of the rear-wing wake, and as a result what the following car sees is much cleaner flow. We are from a near 50%, down to about 5-10% loss. So we have a massive reduction of the loss of downforce for the following car.
“But we are aware that when development takes place from teams who don’t care what the following car performance is and just care about the front car, that may negate some of these gains. That is our task: to make rules that try to prevent that as much as possible.”
Beyond the change in car concept, F1’s stakeholders also want to ensure that the tyre rules work better, to avoid the problem of cars being unable to battle for too long because the outer casing overheats.
This will require a new philosophy, moving away from highdegradation tyres to a more benign product that can be pushed harder for longer.
As F1 chief technical officer of motorsport Pat Symonds said: “We were asking completely the wrong things of Pirelli over the past few years. The high-degradation target was not the way to go, I think.”
F1 is also evaluating a reduction in driver aids, a potential return for refuelling, and limiting the use of telemetry to hold back the influence engineers are having on the racing.