“I’m being passed down the straights like a GP2. This is embarrassing, very embarrassing.”
“GP2 engine, GP2, arrgh!” Sound familiar? Unless you’ve gone to ground in recent days you’ll know that these are the words of Fernando Alonso, likening his Honda power unit to the less rip-snorting junior formula equivalent over his team radio. As broadcast to the world via the TV feed of the Japanese Grand Prix.
He’s said similar before via the same channel, such as in Canada where he reckoned his McLaren team looked like “amateurs” with the amount of fuel-saving necessary. But this one was considered a step beyond, especially as it was done at Honda’s home race with Honda’s royalty present. Possibly not a coincidence.
And the wider fallout, and of the hysterical sort, was considerable. As were the predicted consequences, not least for the Spaniard. That Alonso had slaughtered a sacred cow. That he’d be out of McLaren shortly; presumably by extension out of the sport too. Articles on the Autosport website about it shot straight to the top of its most read. Sky F1’s post-race TV coverage devoted near enough half an hour solid to it, and before they’d covered anything else like, you know, the race winner.
Moreover the moral opprobrium was laid on with a shovel. “It’s that mentality that’s going to destroy things…if you’re not happy with the situation, bugger off,” said an unusually-riled Johnny Herbert on Sky, who also described Alonso’s radio comments as “stupid”. “It’s the manner that he does it,” he went on, “why not just get on with the driving itself?…You can talk about it behind the closed doors but don’t do it out there where the world can hear”. No doubt much more in this vein will follow.
Part of the problem no doubt is we tend to assume everything that Alonso says is for a reason; some like to assume it comes mostly with a nefarious edge. In the former matter at least the Spaniard has some form.
And his words didn’t exist in a vacuum. Alonso had spoken earlier in the weekend about winning world championships outside of F1, while his old acquaintance Flavio Briatore suggested to the Spanish newspaper El Mundo that Alonso wouldn’t hang around if the McLaren wasn’t good for podiums next year. “There’s a man trying to get fired, I reckon”, said Martin Brundle immediately after the first GP2 reference. Maybe, but unless Alonso is indeed minded to quit F1 altogether and go off to say WEC in the immediate term then it’d be rather silly. And Alonso reaffirmed his commitment to McLaren and his continuing optimism later.
Is it to get the rule-makers to jump on lifting restrictions on testing and engine development, that have held his McLaren team and engine supplier back this year? Possibly, though those looking for rancour won’t appreciate this one as it’d put him onto precisely the same agenda as a certain R. Dennis (as R.Dennis himself reiterated after the Suzuka race). If it was intended to make Honda jump then that wouldn’t put him at much of a variance from McLaren’s top brass either. McLaren Group CEO Ron Dennis hypothesised indeed that Alonso might have been trying this. “The drivers get relatively minimal interface with key management of Honda…maybe this is to make sure the message is heard by everybody” he said.
Perhaps though, as it took Ted Kravitz to point out, it might simply have been Alonso sounding off. You know, he was frustrated, not only off the pace but being passed as if he was parked pretty much no matter what he did in defence. He’s an emotional guy sometimes; a proud one always. We know how deeply disappointing the McLaren-Honda has been this year, particularly on the engine front. The media likes sensation of course but often the more mundane explanations are also the more likely.
And as I’ve said many times, including in previous cases involving Sebastian Vettel and Lewis Hamilton, I’m not nearly as determined as some to hammer F1 drivers for what is said on the team radio. This is on the grounds that none of us would appreciate having our every outburst from that extreme situation – when such outbursts are most likely – available for potential broadcast to millions upon millions.
Alonso himself picked up on this very point later, tweeting: “When we are fighting in group is difficult, we all want to win, and sometimes transmit the team radios, but it should be private chats”.
It was left also to Dennis afterwards to pat down the ruffled feathers. “He [Alonso] vents his frustration in different ways” he said. “I wouldn’t say it’s constructive, but at the end of the day I’m not going to get too angry about it…I do not condone it but I’m not going to criticise our drivers because they’re pretty frustrated”. In other words what Alonso said wasn’t advisable but was at some level understandable and no one’s going to die in a ditch about it.
But there’s a broader matter here, something that I’ve wondered for a while and this case merely is the latest manifestation. When exactly did F1 get this precious?
For one thing such sensitivity to harsh words is hardly in keeping with F1’s view of itself. Are we not always told what a tough environment it is? That under performance is not tolerated? Molly-coddling can’t be expected? And that – bottom line – it’s a results business? How exactly do the various reactions to Alonso’s words fit with this? That as well as being a brilliant and uncompromisingly committed competitor drivers have got to be fine upstanding figures of patience, politeness and moral rectitude at all times too? As if they’re not people’s feelings will be hurt?
For another it wasn’t always this way either. I grew up with Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost and Nigel Mansell as the three clear driving ringleaders. All were brilliant, and this generation of talent has gone into folklore. Often too you hear yearning for their day when F1 had ‘characters’. All too though in their own ways were rather a lot of trouble. To the point that Nando by comparison appears a model of diplomacy.
On top of their considerable driving skills the legendary trio each were known for being far from passive presences inside their teams; often they could be downright political. Yet this at the time was considered a positive even – it may not have always been pleasant but one of the things that set them apart from the pretenders to the throne was that they banged their fists on tables and got things done their way. The strife they brought also was seen largely as something you just had to cope with to get the sky-scraping up-side.
Many observers said Senna in effect ran the McLaren team (proprietor: Mr R. Dennis) when he drove there. To give one example Gordon Kimball, who among many other things was a McLaren engineer in Senna’s time, said in a recent Motorsport magazine interview that Dennis in the early 1990s had agreed with him to start a McLaren Indycar programme, only for it to be knocked on the head by Senna. “He believed it would be a distraction and that put the kibosh on the whole project…it was Ayrton who stopped it” said Kimball.
As for Senna the team player, well to give another example having spent the 1990-1991 close season away in Brazil while the rest of the team slogged, after returning to sample the car in testing on the eve of the campaign opener Senna declared grandly in public that there was “not enough power or progress” in his new mount (thus publically criticising the same Honda that we’re told now won’t be able to cope with public criticism). He did though go on to win the opening four rounds that year…
Senna then throughout 1992 and 1993 in the wake of far superior Williams didn’t care to veil his feeling in public that he should be in one of the Grove cars, as if it was his sheer right. In the Portuguese round’s post-race televised press conference in late 1992, by which point it was clear that Prost had outmanoeuvred him for the plumb Williams seat for the following year and had with it vetoed the possibility of the Brazilian joining him, Senna bellowed that Prost’s stance was “like if you’re going in an 100 metre sprint and you want to have running shoes and everyone else should have lead shoes”. Proceeding with ‘lead shoes’ presumably is how he viewed his prevailing situation in a McLaren; a team that he’d won three drivers’ titles in the previous four years with.
“His continual criticism of the team while out of the cockpit…was irksome in the extreme” observed the scribe Alan Henry at that season’s end. “Ayrton was so driven, so insecure, so paranoid and so everything else…Ayrton accomplished a lot but he was a very difficult character” added Kimball.
Then we have Mansell. “It’s not breaking any new ground to say that the guy is hugely confrontational” said Patrick Head of his then-charge. “That was part of what made him so good, in fact, but he wears his competitiveness on his sleeve – doesn’t rein it in, in any way at all. It’s there the whole time. He also has a very strong persecution complex, and thinks everyone is trying to shaft him at all times. So you had an environment of strain whenever Mansell was around, and on a day-to-day basis that became extremely wearing. However, that was his way of getting the job done, and that he undoubtedly did in 1992 [when Mansell won the title].”
Frank Williams concurs: “Nigel was terrific in the car, but a tough bastard out of it. He knew what he wanted, and pushed to get it – and when he didn’t get it life could be deeply unpleasant. But he did the job, no question about it.”
Like Senna, Mansell wasn’t always above airing such grievances in front of media microphones either.
Ex-world champion Alan Jones during the Japanese race indeed suggested that Nando’s words were something of a throwback: “Alonso’s comments on the engine remind me of James Hunt who said it as he saw it” he observed. Indeed Jones himself knew the power of public tickings-off in the name of getting results, just as Dennis thought Alonso was doing. “Goodyear are letting us down” Jones said of his tyres to journalist Nigel Roebuck at the 1981 Austrian Grand Prix, “we need some proper qualifiers. If it was up to me, I’d go back to Michelin tomorrow”. And when it was pointed out that such things often are preceded with ‘don’t quote me’ or similar, Jones was resolute. “Write it” he said. “It might get someone angry – and then something might get done about it”.
Team sport has an apparent reverence of militaristic-type esprit de corps and its many unwritten rules. Abandoning any sense of the individual for the needs of the whole being one. Airing any grievances in private not public being another. Two ‘rules’ that Alonso fell foul of in Japan. But are these even helpful? And worse than not helpful might they be actually to a team’s detriment? On this subject we can turn to cricketer turned commentator and writer Ed Smith, who among other things has analysed sport, our attitudes to it and its wider implications. And recently he had this to say on our traditional, and often instinctive, attitude to the team.
“A heresy will not leave me alone. It cuts against almost everything I have ever been told to believe about teams, sport, management and leadership. Yet the more I guiltily reflect on the idea, the truer it feels…’There is no ‘I’ in team’ is perhaps the best-known cliché in management. What if there shouldn’t be a ‘we’?
“The contribution of independents is undervalued and seldom nurtured. The concept of a ‘team player’ – bubbly, socially needy, energetic, conventional – is far too narrow…Worse, in both sport and business, players with independent or (heaven forbid) introverted temperaments are often dragged into the conventional middle ground, undermining the value of the insurance they offer against risk. Managers are conditioned to favour convergence – of mood, temperament and opinions. Instead, they should foster divergence.”
In other words our usual attitude to the team is indeed detrimental, as it risks dragging the extraordinary contributor to the more mediocre level of those around them. Which helps no one.
Alonso indeed, in another way that he is like Jones, is one who makes simmering rage such as that evidenced in his Suzuka words work for him. “He is a racing driver who needs to have the energy, the passion” said Dennis to this end amid the post-race frenzy.
And, bottom line again, Alonso has been delivering where it matters for McLaren in very trying circumstances this season – unlike his team or engine supplier you might say. Monaco aside he’s been McLaren’s race day pacesetter everywhere (in Monza he ran behind team mate Jenson Button for much of the way but that was down to a split strategy). And even among his barbs the Japanese race was a quintessential example, him ending up 25 seconds and five places clear of his very good team mate and even with his problems bagging a P11 that his car hardly deserved (and on a day too that only one rival dropped out, and he was well behind the Spaniard at the time).
The idea that an F1 team should toss all that to one side because the said driver complains a bit and sometimes requires management is risible. Not only does it seem a rather craven cop out it’s close to a dereliction of duty.
Yet it’s not just imagination. There are those who say that Alonso’s ways are a lot of the explanation for him ending up in this predicament in the first place, apparently shunned by the pace-setting teams. Certainly there is a want of a better explanation. The phrase cutting off your nose to spite your face springs to mind.
While too such debates aren’t unheard of in other team sports this F1-type stance doesn’t appear to constrain them nearly so much. Take Cristiano Ronaldo of Alonso’s favoured football team Real Madrid, World Footballer of the Year. To be euphemistic he’s never been known as a team player and frequently has shown behaviour to match, even going so far as to refuse to celebrate a team mate’s goal if he felt he should have scored it instead. But there has never been the slightest suggestion that his club should hold his foibles against him. As Iain Macintosh wrote, “you put up with this and you allow this because he’s Ronaldo!…Ronaldo is a preposterous athlete, the absolute physical pinnacle, a legitimate phenomenon”.
Macintosh added too, perhaps instructively, that “this is Ronaldo, an odd chap but one who has turned himself into one of the greatest footballers of all time through strength of personality and dedication to his craft. Imagine how competitive you have to be to get that good.” In other words, it could be that cases of ‘he’s brilliant but he’s difficult’ are not matters of unlucky coincidence. One begets the other.
And to answer the initial question of when indeed F1 got this precious, I have a theory that part of it is the sizeable effect of Michael Schumacher. He of course had a lengthy and scarcely credible era of dominance, and during his career so far as we know never wavered from the strict line of backing his team in public. Perhaps with this we assumed that his was the only way to prevail. But perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps furthermore Michael was an exception.
Perhaps too as has been argued the modern age of the internet and social media rather lends itself to frenzy. Perhaps it reflects that these days we have more ways of hearing about these things. Perhaps we’re just more histrionic generally.
Clearly also some ire is reserved just for Alonso. We only need to look at Button’s comments about the McLaren team said both during the Singapore weekend as well as during and after Suzuka’s qualifying session, which not only were highly critical but often rather snide. He even after the Suzuka race suggested that the speed differential between the Honda and its rivals bordered the dangerous. And yet there was next to no fallout, beyond contributing to the speculation that already existed about whether Jenson intended to retire. Certainly I recall no moral outrage. It is evident that reputations precede these things by a distance. Plenty I get the impression too have been convinced all along that Alonso’s latest attempt at a relationship with McLaren is bound to implode as it did in 2007. Perhaps they want to encourage it to happen in order to be proved right.
Most probably it’s all of these and more coming together. But next time you are tempted to get outraged at something Alonso or any other driver for that matter says or does just stop yourself. And ask whether it’s worth getting outraged about at all.