Quote:
Originally Posted by Rock
F1 is and always has been about luck as much as it is about ability.
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Like it or not F1 is not primarily about the drivers. The teams value the constructors championship more than they do an individual drivers achievements. F1 is at its core an engineering competition. The challenge is to design and build from the ground up a car, within a very specific set of rules, that can complete a series of races quicker than everybody else's car. One of the key words there is "complete". If your car keeps breaking down you are fundamentally failing the test. This is only unlucky if your perspective is solely that of the driver. But the driver is only one of hundreds who make up an F1 team and even the best driver in the world will acknowledge he is only a small part of getting the car to go as fast as possible.
On the general point of luck, show me a sport that has zero element of luck and I'll show you a sport nobody is interested in.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Rock
Alonso would likely have several more World Championship wins if he had gone to Mercedes instead of Ferrari and McLaren when they were both in the doldrums.
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There's two relevant elements to this with Alonso. Firstly he is an exceptionally gifted driver. Secondly he is, by all accounts, a nightmare to work with (I'm being polite). It could just as easily be said that if he wasn't such a diva, he'd have more world titles. He left Ferrari acrimoniously when he could be driving their current title challenging car. He could also have replaced Rosberg at Merc but Toto Wolf would quite rightly not risk a repeat of the 2007 season that McLaren endured. Speaking of which, Alonso may well have won the title that year too, had he not thrown his toys out of the pram because Lewis was given equal treatment. In fact, Alonso could even have been champion the following year had he stayed since the McLaren won the drivers championship in 2008! It was his own fault that by completely burning his bridges with the best team at the time he ended up in "the doldrums" with Ferrari.
Alonso is his own worst enemy.