Absolutely brilliant post by John L Sharp in Ed’s blog.
To be honest, I must admit I’ve supported Ferrari since I started watching Formula 1 and last season I wanted Schumacher to win the WDC sooo badly! I have *never* experienced such powerful emotions watching F1 as I did with the last race in Brazil.
If someone asked me why I love this sport I would play that DVD to him.
In fact I can’t recall Alonso’s celebration, but I definitely remember Schumi waving goodbye and a stupid engineer from Renault with a banner saying ‘Schumacher who?’
Anyway, when the Kaiser left I was really looking forward to see Kimi driving a Ferrari and the oncoming battle with Alonso in his silver arrow: until Monaco ended, I was cheering both red drivers and not him. But then Hamilton started whinging about unfair treatment and things begun getting complicated for Fernando…
The way I see it (and most of Spaniards for that matter), Alonso is the outsider in a British team with a British driver who will do whatever it takes to win - with the collusion of the team leader and the sport’s governing authorities: that’s why RD has openly admitted to be racing Fernando and not Kimi, that’s why Lewis got the crane lift in Germany, that’s why he hasn’t got penalized after the incident with the safety car in Japan, that’s why nothing happened when he urged the stewards to push him from the gravel -endangering their lives as well as his own!- when it is illegal…
And yet the point of no return took place in Hungary. We have a saying in Spain “no hay peor ciego que el que no quiere ver” (there’s no blinder person than the one who doesn’t want to see) which fits the state of denial British press and fans live in about what happened there. Lewis ignored team orders about a previous agreement, Fernando followed the team orders which Hamilton obviously didn’t like (go fucking swivel to RD, let’s not forget) and then Lewis sent his dad to the stewards to complain… against his own team!
We know what happened after that (or part of it, at least), but then everything was a chain of events triggered by Lewis’ attitude. Paradoxically, after everything that has happened since then, the team is all behind Lewis - and then again, let’s not forget that Lewis went to Paris with his own lawyer only to defend himself!
Seeing all that, of course I have started supporting Alonso. This season is not about driving and competing anymore: it’s just a political set-up to have a British F1 champion again no matter how.
At some point Ecclestone must have thought that having a black british champion would maximize the audience… but I’m afraid that it’ll only happen in the UK. You can visit autosport’s forums and check what kind of simpathy Lewis has got amongst die-hard F1 fans around the world.
I want Alonso to win, but only to shut a lot of mouths up. What I’m really looking forward to is for this crappy season to end and have a decent one again in 2008.