At the Hungarian Grand Prix last weekend, Lewis Hamilton of McLaren was denied a start to a qualifying lap because of the antics of his Spanish teammate Fernando "The Loser" Alonso, which resulted in a furious row between him and team boss Ron Dennis on the radio. What happened was that Alonso had apparently stayed long enough in the pits to deny Hamilton from crossing the start-finish line of the track to start his flying lap - the demarcation which allows for the start of a qualifying lap. Cars which have not crossed the line once the timer has stopped counting down will not have that lap taken into consideration, whereas cars which have already crossed that line are allowed to complete their qualifying lap even if the timer has stopped, and their times taken into consideration. Not that any of this mattered to Alonso.
The two-time world champion - who won't be for longer, I think - apparently was on some sort of strategy which was quite different from Hamilton's, as can be seen from this excerpt from Top Gear's website
"....may never know the truth about what happened next - did the team hold him back or was it solely Alonso's decision.
The stewards looked at the incident closely before throwing out McLaren's claims that the delay was merely due to a communication occurring between the team and Alonso."
The question here is: was Alonso putting Hamilton in a box on purpose, or were team instructions really as such to hold his position in the pits? That will be stifled internally at McLaren, you can bet on it. We'll never know for sure.
What I think the reason is that Alonso forcibly blocked Hamilton could be due to two things here, being
a) the most obvious one, in that Alonso had knocked Hamilton off his pole qualifying position by just 0.1 of a second and was determined to keep P1 at all costs, or
b) it was a tit-for-tat maneuver.
To be honest, Hamilton wasn't a good boy either. He had knowingly disregarded team instructions earlier to let Alonso through during qualifying laps, which in other words means he blocked Mister Spaniard on-track during their earlier qualifying attempts. But unlike Alonso, Hamilton did apologize for his misdeed and made up for it - apparently by talking to every person in the garage and to Ron to diffuse the situation. To cut the long story short, race stewards promptly investigated and found in favour of Hamilton. They wasted no time in kicking Fernando out of pole position back down all the way to sixth in the starting order, letting the Brit take pole.
Fernando, Fernando, Fernando. You really need to get off your high horse and stop wanting people to treat you like a sort of semi-god over at McLaren. We all know that you're a fantastic driver, a two-time world champion and a damn well paid one at that, but this is ridiculous. You have to accept that you may be good, but there are people who are most visibly better than you at the moment, i.e. a certain Lewis Hamilton. Dreaming up a Machiavellian scheme at this point in time isn't going to help either, with the crap McLaren is going through, what with "spygate" and all. Apropos Hamilton is really much more capable than you now, so why don't you stop whining and bitching about "not being treated as I would like to have been" and race like a real man? Concordantly Hamilton - in an era where Formula 1 drivers don't speak very much, if at all - is being very open about the whole situation. Kimi Raikkonen needs subtitles when speaking, Felipe Massa needs a longer tongue, and YOU need a proper seeing-to.
My dear conquistador, if you really want to live up to your forefathers' daring, you need to start showing some professionalism instead of resorting to ridiculous means to win. Don't say you haven't been warned.
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