Sunday 29 June 2014

Will Fernando Alonso ever win another title?


Fernando Alonso is arguably the best driver currently racing in Formula 1. He’s a two time world champion who has proved his worth in the best cars and most certainly in many poorer cars as he drags them to wins and podiums they shouldn’t be achieving. He’s come so close to adding another title but missed out so often but with Ferrari continuing to squander the talents of their lead driver and the Spaniard certainly in the latter stages of his career will he get another opportunity to secure the third title he so desperately craves? 

Since he won his last world championship all the way back in 2006 for Renault, he has fought for a further three, all of which he perhaps should have won in 2007, 2010 and 2012. Two of which, and one in particular when he was driving a car which just didn’t deserve to be competing at the front, let alone nearly winning the world championship.

After winning for Renault he joined McLaren which was a tumultuous season and which quickly meant an exit back to Renault to have two relatively uncompetitive years where he scored just two wins and failed to win in 2009. But everyone knew he was still fighting as hard as he could mostly, especially when a sniff of a decent result came along.

Ferrari likes to have the best driver available and so rescued him for what would surely become one of the most successful partnerships in the sport. It hasn’t been. Admittedly it should have accrued him at least another two titles but that was more down to the driver than the team. This Alonso-Ferrari combination is now entering its fifth season together and if you go on the Michael Schumacher-Ferrari formula of success, it should be bearing the fruits of countless winners trophies. But it isn’t, it’s probably going to result in Alonso’s first winless season since the dark days of 2009, and that is just unacceptable to a man of Alonso’s quality and drive to succeed.

His lack of winning titles hasn’t done his reputation any harm at all. If anything it’s enhanced it greatly. 2012 should go down as one of the best examples of driving a near perfect season as anyone has ever seen only derailed by others mistakes, and I’m sure it will for the many knowledgeable fans out there, but for the casual fan the name written next to 2012 as the championship winner will be Sebastian Vettel’s and that’s all they’ll know.

I think it would be a tragedy for a driver the calibre of Alonso to end his career without another world title especially because in my opinion he is so much better now than when he won his first two titles. Is Alonso destined to be a driver remembered for just a couple of titles but mainly for outperforming his machinery? 

There’s something heroic about that, but in the end it’s not what gets you recognised as a true great around the world, success is the true barometer of a sportman’s legacy for many, and unfortunately for Fernando that’s been in short supply for too long. He needs another title, as if you cared to you could question his first two championships? When Kimi was a true speed king, he might well have won in 2005 if his McLaren hadn’t have been so unreliable. 2006 too, Schumacher probably should have won if it were not for an engine failure while leading at the penultimate race. 

I do tend to look at it another way though, 2005 he maximised his machinery and as is his way, built a championship, won when he could, maximised the points available if he couldn’t. He took the title with two races left to run. His 2006 title will always remain one which should be highly regarded as he battled an at his peak Schumacher to the last race of the season and beat him in pretty equal machinery. But since then he has played second fiddle to Vettel as the young German has exploited the maximum potential of the Red Bull machinery. Alonso has been the main guy to push Vettel, always the one challenging when perhaps he shouldn’t be. It's caused him much frustration to watch Vettel rack up the wins in a superior car when Alonso believes he's not as good as his four championships suggest.

On the Sky sports website, it was noted that that once again it was Alonso who was mixing it with this year’s dominant power unit Mercedes, but asked if he got much satisfaction from outperforming his car he replied tellingly. ‘"Not much," he sighed. "It's been five years like this. There is always satisfaction that everyone believes you are always performing at your best. There's the respect from drivers, Team Principals and fans for the job that you do. But I prefer to have no respect and to win more trophies."’

And there’s the rub of it. Alonso has made no secret of the fact that he deeply desires a third world title to put him amongst the greats like Ayrton Senna (although there’s plenty of great double world champions too), but as he approaches his 33rd birthday in just a month, time is running out for him to achieve his ambition.

You could say he has at least another four to five seasons but at the moment he is contracted at Ferrari until 2016, a team which should be producing consistently competitive cars but which have now been struggling to do that for over five years. Periodically Ferrari go through fallow periods, I don’t expect this one to last as long as the 21 year wait that Schumacher ended in 2000, but it’s not unreasonable to say it could be longer than four or five years.

Ferrari has been struggling with the calibration of their wind tunnel and even the supposed fix for this season doesn’t seem to be producing. They’ve brought in people like Pat Fry who designed for McLaren before and James Allison who was at Lotus and worked for Ferrari in the latter stages of the Ferrari steamroller of success. After the Schumacher era though, the core group of people that made the team work so harmoniously fell apart gradually, and it hasn’t had that same harmony since. It’s like trying to tape up a cut when it needs stitches; it’s not going to get better quickly. It’s taken Alonso to drag the limping horse to its feet these past few years and he continues to do that this season as he makes a mockery of the excitement that (an admittedly struggling) Kimi Raikkonen would challenge him as his team mate this year. 

Alonso publically maintains belief that Ferrari can step up next season, but it always seems to be next season at the moment with scarlet team. So where could he go? It’s well known his management team did a bit of investigating at Red Bull last season, but the likelihood is that with the immediate success of Daniel Ricciardo partnering Vettel, that driver combination will remain for a few years yet, although if Vettel doesn’t start beating Ricciardo a bit more you never know. 

McLaren have Honda coming on board next year, it’s a partnership that should work but McLaren aren’t exactly producing great chassis at the moment either and it’s bound to take a few years for this partnership to come to fruition. Despite saying things to the contrary I’m not sure Ron Dennis would want Alonso back after the 2007 spy gate affair lead to his acrimonious departure after just one season of a three year contract.

Mercedes? I think they’re quite happy with Nico Rosberg and Hamilton to be honest despite a Mercedes board member heaping praise on the Spaniard. I’m not sure any team would really want to put Alonso and Hamilton together again.  There really doesn’t seem anywhere open to him that would be immediately competitive. I’m afraid also that his reputation of throwing his toys out of his pram on occasion at Renault, the bust up at McLaren and the increasingly frosty relationship he seems to have at Ferrari has put people off him, he could disrupt the team especially if a team mate gets too close for comfort.

Unfortunately for Alonso he looks stuck at Ferrari as his best bet and that might mean he may never win a title again. As the younger generation become more established and he is in the latter years of his career, it becomes increasingly unlikely that a team will look to him to lead them for the future. After this season it will have been eight years since he won the world title. It wouldn’t be right for his career to be defined by early success and then a constant fight with sub-optimal cars that he out drove.

However, I’m not sure it would be right for him to jump into the best car and beat everyone either. No, for a fighter such as Alonso I think it would be far more poetic for him to create the perfect season as his legacy in a car just off the best. To drag and cajole it to perform miracles that no one on the grid (apart from perhaps Lewis when the mood takes him) could do. 

It’s obviously frustrated him to be given substandard machinery, after the epic 2012, last season he seemed subdued sometimes but who can forget that stare after he lost the title in the final round, it spoke of just total amazement and devastation, it was like he couldn’t quite believe that he could have lost after everything he’d done. He had put so much effort into 2012 that I think it was inevitable that after all he had done for Ferrari and they once again failed to keep up their side of the bargain that he would be sometimes below par. 

However he has regained the fight this year despite another poor car. I truly believe he can recreate a 2012 performance again. He might want to do it in the best car, but I’m not sure Ferrari can give him that for a while and there are no openings elsewhere. One more perfect season Fernando, he can be king again and he deserves to be.

all photo's taken from autosport.com

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