Fernando Alonso -- An underrated champion

How does he do it? Time and again in this edition of the Formula One World Championships, Fernando Alonso has driven the wheels of an underachieving Scuderia Ferrari to the point where he now finds himself leading the Driver’s Championship by a healthy 34 points from Mark Webber at the halfway stage of the season. Alonso currently has 154 points to Webber’s 120. To put it in context, Alonso’s teammate, the oft-maligned Felipe Massa, is in 14th place with 23 points.

When people are asked who they think the most talented drivers on the grid are, most of them immediately come up with Sebastien Vettel and Lewis Hamilton. In my opinion, those two are great drivers, but they don’t hold a candle to Fernando Alonso. Of all the other drivers on the grid, only Alonso at this stage merits comparisons with the all-time greats like Senna, Prost and a certain Schumacher, even though he doesn’t have the titles to show for it. Yet, with all this greatness, he’s gone about doing his business in a relatively quiet manner when the pressure is on Vettel to prove that he is the premier driver in Formula One today.

I am not going to compare eras so what I will do is try to defend my opinion that Fernando is at the very top among, arguably, the 3 best drivers on the grid – the other 2 being Vettel and Hamilton. First off, it is very clear that the Red Bulls and Mclarens are better than the Ferraris in terms of performance. At the very least, the Constructor’s Championship bears out that fact. But Alonso has finished every race in the season in the points so far, the only one to do that over 10 races. That is remarkable consistency, which is why he leads the Driver’s Championship. Alonso is the perfect blend of the balls-out aggression shown by Juan Pablo Montoya and the silky-smooth style of Jenson Button. Almost like a Michael Schumacher in his heyday. He can really turn it on when he needs to and can adopt a tyre-saving smooth driving style with equal ease. But throw in the fact that Ferrari were genuinely considered midfield runners at the start of the season, Alonso’s skills suddenly sound scary. Vettel does his best work when he is ahead of the pack. He blitzes through the circuits when there is clean air in front of him – his raw pace is astounding. But when he’s been trailing the leaders, he has shown the tendency of not handling his tyres very well and cracking under pressure. Lewis Hamilton, on the other hand, is also another one of those drivers who maximizes the limits of an underachieving car. Alonso has said so himself. But Hamilton is far too inconsistent and has a tendency to get into meaningless battles and causing a few accidents.

Alonso, unlike the other two, is a thinking driver. The Ferrari team is famed for their race strategies to make the best of any given situation. This, coupled with Alonso’s keen racing sense, has seen them leapfrog many a car to bring home consistent podium finishes. Another underrated aspect of Alonso’s driving is his start. He absolutely rockets out of the starting grid, often advancing 2 or 3 places at the start in every race (when he’s not on pole, which he hasn’t been until very recently). Combine that with his ability to control the pace of the field behind him and you have 10 continuous points finishes. His recent win in Hockenheim was masterful, given that Vettel and Button clearly had better pace. He conserved his tyres in the parts of the circuit where he had to and never let them get within 1 second of him, which is when you can enable the DRS wing. His wins in Malaysia and Valencia were opportunistic, but he put himself in the position to capitalize on his opponents’ errors.

Overall, there is no better all-round driver on the grid than Fernando Alonso. He has recently stated that the drivers receive no respect (with all the controversies he’s been in, the statement is a bit ironic), but he deserves every bit of respect he gets. In this season, Ferrari owe their resurgence to him!