day by day: a blog
July 22, 2007
Alonso in the Rain
Fernando Alonso in a McLaren-Mercedes wins the GP of Europe in a crazy, rain-punctuated race at the Nürburgring, passing Felipe Massa's Ferrari with only five or so laps remaining. Alonso is my favourite driver. I am ecstatic! The best races, like this one, always involve a change of leader in the final stages. Scuderia Ferrari is the most entrenched team in F1, the team with the longest competitive history (Ferraris made their debut in F1 in 1948 and a Ferrari first won a Grand Prix in 1951). I feel unpleasantly edgy about the team's power and know-how, so it was delightful to see Alonso muscle his way past Massa's car, surviving as he did Massa's attempt to nudge him into a spin. Afterwards, in the area behind the presentation podium, they went at each other like bickering children. "You broke my sidepod!" "You win and you say this?!" It seemed clear that the desperate Massa did try to push Alonso off the road. But, according to the drivers' unofficial code of honour, the victor Alonso should not have called Massa after the race on his mad behaviour because Alonso had survived it and won. But Alonso has never been very good at mouth-management offtrack. Oh, so much sensitivity and determination in the car, so much human ordinariness out of it! I loved that too.
Posted by njenkins at July 22, 2007 08:00 PM
With the exception of interspersed quotations, all writing is © 2007-09 by Nicholas Jenkins