How is Alonso still in F1?

Fellow posters, I see on these boards a serious concern for driver safety and felt it was right to join the debate on this very important issue.

Kindly see below, it's a lengthy read;


At the 2003 European Grand Prix, David Coulthard and McLaren managing director Martin Whitmarsh accused Alonso of giving Coulthard a brake test. This was in relation to a passage of racing towards the end of the race when Coulthard was trying to overtake Alonso, who was holding him up. Coulthard swerved off the track and into retirement during an attempted overtake.

At the 2003 Brazilian Grand Prix, Alonso, who had already been penalized for ignoring yellow flags, was still going at maximum speed despite the fact that Mark Webber's accident happened more than a minute before he arrived on the scene. When Webber crashed Alonso was ahead of him on the road by around 14 seconds. This meant that there was around 75 seconds in which the Renault team could have communicated to Alonso that there had been a major accident.

At the 2006 Hungarian Grand Prix, Alonso was involved in an incident in which he brake tested Red Bull Racing test driver Robert Doornbos in the second free practice session. The stewards decided that Alonso's actions were "unnecessary, unacceptable and dangerous", and awarded him a one second time penalty to be applied to his fastest lap time in each of the qualifying sessions.

After a separate incident from the same race, when Michael Schumacher was asked whether he thought Alonso deliberately slowed down so that Schumacher had to pass him under red flags in practice, Schumacher replied, "You said that, I didn't.

In the 2006 Italian Grand Prix, after stewards ruled Alonso had potentially blocked Felipe Massa in Saturday qualifying and relegated him five places on the starting grid, Alonso stated "I love the sport, love the fans coming here — a lot of them from Spain but I don't consider Formula One like a sport any more".

In the qualifying for the 2007 Hungarian Grand Prix, while both McLarens were in the pits, Alonso remained stationary in the McLaren pit for a few seconds. This delayed the then provisional pole sitter and team-mate Lewis Hamilton long enough to prevent him from getting another 'hot lap'. However, Alonso was subsequently given a five-place grid penalty and his McLaren team were docked the 15 constructors' World Championship points they would have earned in the race.

As a result of this investigation, it emerged that some team members within McLaren, among them Alonso, were aware of confidential information belonging to the Ferrari team. This information was commented on to Alonso by McLaren test driver Pedro de la Rosa who had also received information from McLaren chief designer Mike Coughlan. The email contained text suggesting that Alonso was surprised by the data and doubted its authenticity. According to the "spygate" related email exchanges between Alonso and de la Rosa, it was clear that Alonso knew about Ferrari's pit strategies in the Australian Grand Prix and Bahrain Grand Prix. Ron Dennis told the FIA about the case during the Hungarian Grand Prix. Amid media allegations that Alonso threatened Dennis with reporting the team to FIA himself if he was not given number one driver status. This was when Dennis found out about Ferrari data and immediately informed the FIA. FIA then revealed that it had had knowledge of the Spygate case thanks to a slip made by Coughlan.

In what became known in the media as "Crashgate", Renault allegedly ordered Alonso's teammate Nelson Piquet, Jr. to crash at the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix, causing a safety-car incident at a moment where Alonso would get tremendous benefit from his race strategy, putting him towards the front of the field, and giving him a fighting chance to win the race, after a number of opponents (Felipe Massa, Robert Kubica and Kimi Räikkönen to name a few) suffered.

In the 2010 German Grand Prix at Hockenheim, Alonso became involved in a controversy with team-mate Massa, as Ferrari were accused of using team orders during the race. The incident started when Massa was leading the race and Ferrari engineer Rob Smedley said "Fernando is faster than you. Can you confirm you understood that message?". Shortly after this, Massa slowed down and was overtaken by Alonso. Shortly after the race notable people of the senior personnel in Ferrari, Massa and Alonso were summoned to the stewards. The matter was then referred to the FIA World Motor Sport Council. and Ferrari were given a $100,000 fine but the result of the race was unchanged.

In the 2010 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, Alonso was seen gesticulating furiously at Vitaly Petrov on the slowing down lap in front of TV cameras for not letting him overtake in a gesture of poor sportsmanship.

It's clear to see that this driver is not only dangerous but has no regard for team mates or colleagues and shouldn't be in the sport.

Thank you for reading.