Esteban Ocon and Fernando Alonso, at the Jeddah circuit. /
Analysis
The surprising aggressiveness of the Frenchman to defend himself against the attacks of the Spanish has placed the Alpine team in an uncomfortable position for the remainder of the season
The faces in the Alpine garage during those two or three laps in which Esteban Ocon and Fernando Alonso battled it out for sixth place in the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix said it all. Team boss Otmar Szafnauer couldn’t believe the Frenchman defended every inch of his position against his own teammate as if it were the last lap of the last race and he was on the brink of clinching the title.
It was just a few turns, but something was seen that, until now, seemed to be something from other teams. Ocon forgot for a moment that it was Alonso who was behind, with more pace and better tires, and although in the end the Asturian’s abandonment had nothing to do with this incident, he did portray that the ‘Pax Alpina’ is not such . The meeting after the race was not comfortable at all. Although the statements that came out of the team were optimistic and the story was focused from the point of view of the show – “It was a fight worthy of karts”, “hard but fair”, “we had fun”… -, there is no team that wants its two pilots fight until touching the accident and much less for a sixth place.
Within that argument, they even see positive that both have been allowed to fight. After all, this is one of the objectives of the new regulations: to make the races more fun because the cars can follow each other and fight one on one without serious problems. “If they can follow each other more easily, they can start to overtake each other lap after lap. That’s exactly the kind of thing we have to look at: when do we tell them to stop overtaking because it’s taking time?” Szafnauer explained after the race.
One of the most classic topics of romance and adventure movies is that of the hero who wants to conquer his romantic interest but they don’t finish confirming their union. Either because they go at different speeds, or because other characters enter the plot that entangle, in the end that unresolved tension is the locomotive of the argument. It happens in a classic soap opera, in any fashion series and, of course, in life.
The story gets more interesting the closer the conflict gets. Didn’t the audience turn upside down at the 2021 season finale because Hamilton and Verstappen were going to collide? Isn’t that the cheap writer’s trick that they use over and over again at Netflix in their criticized (but consumed) series ‘Drive To Survive’ that has become a worldwide mass phenomenon? Right now Alpine is close to that happening. Alonso has always been superior to his rivals except on a few occasions (of thirteen teammates, only two have finished a season ahead of him in points), leaving the fratricidal struggle that in other teams generated rivers and rivers of ink away from him. Only in 2007, with that dramatic epic that was the McLaren of Ron Dennis and the rookie Lewis Hamilton, the fight between two identical cars put together one of the best rivalry stories ever experienced in competition.
Now that he is an old workhorse who begins to glimpse his near future as a Percheron, Alonso has to deal with a young colt who is willing to do anything to prove his worth. In 2021, despite his victory (achieved largely thanks to Alonso himself), Ocon ended up giving up in the World Cup standings. Now that two races have gone by, and to a large extent because of the abandonment in Arabia, he has stood out minimally from the Spanish and he intends that it be so. He already showed him in those laps in Jeddah that he is not going to keep anything to himself, no matter how much they wear the same overalls.
Do not forget, however, that Alonso shows no mercy. All the colleagues he has had have ended up wanting him to leave, and not because their relationship was bad or because he bullied them, something that has been installed in the collective imagination due to the media speakers, mainly British, determined to use the legend black on the two-time world champion. Alonso is a competitive animal like few others and if Ocon wants to battle, the man from Oviedo will respond. Let the young Frenchman not forget that glory follows virtue as if it were its shadow. Cicero already said it, so if he wants to be remembered, perhaps he shouldn’t mortgage his options in fratricidal fights that, deep down, can only waste time on the Alpine project.
