MOTORSPORT: Formula 1's unhappiest camper

Arguably still the most complete driver in Formula 1, but without a world title for a decade or even a grand prix victory since 2013, Fernando Alonso just wants a level playing field.

“Equal engines for everyone,” Alonso said ruefully when asked what he hoped would change under F1’s now owners, American media group Liberty.

“And not Honda,” he said.

Then he added: “I’m kidding.”

Except that, below the surface, the Spaniard would not have been kidding.

There’s no way the 2005-06 world champion will get his wish for equal engines.

The best he can hope for is that Honda finds some power and reliability during this season – its third back in F1 and the last of his contract with McLaren, the second most successful team in the sport’s history whose most glorious days came with Honda engines in the late 1980s and early ’90s.

Sunday’s Australian Grand Prix at Melbourne’s Albert Park can hardly get worse for Alonso than last year, when he barrel-rolled across a gravel trap and came to a halt upside down against a barrier.

Thankfully he wasn’t seriously injured, but he missed the next race in Bahrain.

The previous year he had missed the season-opener in Melbourne after serious concussion from a mysterious crash while testing the first of the McLaren-Honda hybrids.

The irony is that Alonso’s greatest successes came with Renault in his early 20s rather than at Ferrari, where he spent five years, or McLaren, where he had an earlier, tumultuous season – with Lewis Hamilton as his teammate in his debut year, in which the ‘Spygate’ scandal erupted – when the team was still super-competitive with Mercedes engines.

Sometimes a master of understatement, Alonso says this weekend is going to be “difficult”.

It will be impossible for him and Belgian youngster Stoffel Vandoorne, who substituted for Alonso in Bahrain last year and now has replaced 2009 world champion Jenson Button, to get anywhere near the factory Mercedes and Ferrari cars or the Renault-powered Red Bulls of Daniel Ricciardo and Max Verstappen.

Indeed, the McLaren-Hondas probably won’t come anywhere near the pace of any with a Mercedes engine – the others are the Williams and Force India cars.

Nor perhaps the Haas cars with Ferrari power or the factory Renaults or Red Bull’s junior team, Toro Rosso, also with Renault power.

That leaves only the Sauber-Ferraris as possibly the backmarkers on Sunday’s grid behind the McLaren-Hondas.

Yet it could be the other way around.

And, if starting at the wrong end of the grid is not bad enough, worse for the immensely proud Alsonso will be the humiliation of being overtaken, perhaps twice or more (assuming his car has the reliability to last the 58 laps), by the Mercs, Ferraris and Red Bulls – and probably others.

The two Honda-engined cars could be as much as 30kmh slower than the frontrunners in the fastest parts of the Albert Park circuit.

Again biting his tongue, Alonso says: “There is still a long way to go for us and a lot of work to do. It’s a question mark for us where we exactly are. The first race now will put things a little bit more clear.”

Using the collective ‘we’ and ‘us’ avoids him fingering publicly the hybrid power unit supplier that long-time but now-ousted McLaren chief Ron Dennis banked on returning the team to its former glory.

But it’s no secret that behind the veneer Alonso is bitterly disappointed in the units Honda has supplied. If the first two years of them wasn’t bad enough, the signs are no better – and, if anything, worse – this year.

The whispers are growing louder that the ‘remarriage’ of McLaren and Honda could be headed for ‘divorce’, most probably at the end of this season – as painful as the next eight months may be to get through.

Honda’s F1 chief Yuseke Hasegawa says stoically: “We know we are heading in the right direction. We’ll continue our efforts in order to increase our competitiveness throughout the season.”

The American now heading the commercial side of McLaren, Zak Brown, insists Honda is the right partner. “We’ve just got a technical glitch that we need to work through … very, very quickly,” Brown says.

And Frenchman Eric Boullier, McLaren’s racing director, says Honda needs to streamline the bureaucratic, corporate influence in its F1 department so that it can make changes much more rapidly, doing more of its development in Britain than Japan.

But it’s doubtful that the Japanese giant can move anywhere near as fast as Boullier wants and needs.
And that may just force Alonso into walking away with a very bitter taste in his mouth.

Lewis Hamilton and Sebastien Vettel are already well clear of Alonso’s 32 GP victories, with 53 and 42 respectively.

A sense of hopelessness that he will never win in F1 again, circulating so much slower than Hamilton, Vettel, Ricciardo, and Verstappen and being repeatedly lapped, inevitably must become too galling for this most talented racer who has found himself in the wrong team, with the wrong power unit, at the wrong time.

And it could carve up the young Vandoorne’s career before it barely gets going too.
Formula E sparks greater manufacturer interest
While F1 has its four manufacturers in its hybrid era, the all-electric open-wheeler series Formula E will have more than twice that number by its 2018-19 season.

Formula E announced this week that it has accepted nine manufacturers to be powertrain providers in its fifth season, when it will introduce a futuristic new car with a new standard, longer-life battery – to be produced by McLaren Applied Technologies – that will do away with drivers changing cars mid-race.

And there is still the prospect that a 10th manufacturer, Mercedes, could take up an option it has reserved to enter the series in 2018-19.

The nine manufacturers that Formula E has announced are: Audi-related ABT; BMW, already associated with America’s Andretti Autosport; PSA’s Citroen offshoot DS Automobiles; Jaguar Land Rover; India’s Mahindra Racing; Chinese-owned, British-based NextEV NIO; Penske Autosport, operated by Roger ‘The Captain’ Penske’s son Jay under the name Dragon Racing; Renault; and French-founded, Monaco-owned Venturi Automobiles.

Formula E series boss Alejandro Agag said: “When we launched in 2012 we had forecast to secure at least three manufacturers by season five. The news today [of nine manufacturers] has highlighted the number and quality of manufacturers joining the championship and tripling our initial expectations. This just goes to show the relevance of Formula E to the motor industry and as an attractive proposition.”

The Federation Internationale de o’Automobile (FIA) has been hugely supportive of Formula E and FIA president Jean Todt, now in Australia for the F1 GP, has said: “The homologation of the [Formula E] powertrains that will be used as from season five is a very significant step because it means the cars will be able to run for twice as long while, at the very least, maintaining the same performance level.

"This highlights how motorsport can stimulate and accelerate development of new technologies which can then be applied to road cars and, in this case, it has even more of a key role, given that at the moment electricity is one of the more practical alternatives when it comes to finding new forms of more sustainable mobility in the future.”

More environmentally-friendly yes, but sufficiently entertaining and popular … doubtful.