Fun F1

Ok, I’m going to say straight out that I have a lot of sympathy for Fernando Alonso in the whole qualifying saga on the weekend where he held up Lewis Hamilton. But I will try to present an objective viewpoint..

This appears to be the sequence of events that occurred during Q3 at the Hungaroring:

1. Hamilton fails to obey a team instruction to move over to allow Alonso an extra fuel-burn lap.
2. Alonso is furious during an earlier pit stop, shaking his first and pointing to the pit wall.
3. The team attempt to return the balance to Alonso by holding him longer in the pits in the final pit stop, thus holding up Hamilton and preventing Hamilton from another flying lap.
4. Alonso just makes it around to have another flying lap and takes pole position.

It was quite funny seeing how many people wanted Alonso’s blood in the forums straight after qualifying (before they knew the facts and found out that Hamilton was the instigator of it all). Some news sites even presented remarkably unbalanced and biased commentary of the event. Some even called Alonso a cheater. It’s funny that no-one questioned why Alonso was so mad earlier in qualifying at this time (I know I did).

My take on the whole thing is that Fernando shouldn’t have been penalised. He followed his engineer’s instructions. Sure, take away McLaren’s championship points but to penalise McLaren and Alonso is bizarre. It should be a case of one or the other is to blame. It’s either the team that caused it or the driver.

It will be interesting to see how McLaren deal with Lewis Hamilton now. Perhaps they’ll finally let Fernando keep his testing data to himself..? Either way I’m just majorly annoyed that we didn’t get to see Hamilton and Alonso both on the front row of the grid, mad as hell with each other, going into the first corner at Hungary..