Fernando Alonso CAN win a third consecutive world championship title this year. At Monaco, rookie Lewis Hamilton had no choice but to settle for second while he watched and learned from the master! In Thursday’s blog, in which I previewed the Monaco Grand Prix, I predicted Lewis Hamilton’s maiden F1 victory on the hallowed street circuit, Kimi Raikkonen would probably bring Ferrari team-mate Felipe Massa down by a notch or two and that Fernando Alonso, who turned in lacklustre performances in Bahrain and his home grand prix in Barcelona, might exercise caution and settle for a strong finish at the weekend.
Well, I was wrong on each score, but one of my predictions did come to fruition… Hamilton, Alonso, Massa and Raikkonen have all demonstrated flashes of brilliance in the first four races of the season, but at Monaco – one of them, the double world champion, delivered the first real standout performance of the season. Fernando and Lewis might have the same number of points in the championship standings, but the defending world champion is still the man to beat and he’s in spectacular form. What’s more, McLaren’s dominance at Monaco was like an eerie flashback to the late 1980s, when Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna’s white-and-red cars obliterated the opposition.
Felipe Massa finished a distant third – more than a minute behind the McLaren pair of Alonso and Hamilton. It was clear from the opening laps of the Monaco Grand Prix that, bar the onset of technical problems or a rash of driving errors, either Alonso or Hamilton would receive the winner’s trophy from Prince Albert at the end of the event. Despite his practice accident at St Devote, Hamilton appeared the firm favourite to win the race right until the dying moments of the Monaco Grand Prix qualifying session. However, as soon as the red lights dimmed and the race got underway, Alonso commenced his class.
It goes without saying that Monaco saw Alonso’s best performance since Malaysia and arguably one of the best races of the plucky Spaniard’s career. Whereas the late Senna’s bravado and raw speed almost always prevailed over Prost’s precision and metronomic pace at Monaco, the opposite was true for Hamilton and Alonso on Sunday.
Hamilton’s driving was spectacular. The young Briton threw caution to the wind – his McLaren seemingly in a tantalising dance of death with the street circuit’s uncompromising crash barriers. Did his car brush the barriers on a few occasions? Yeah, probably, but that didn’t diminish his zeal. Barring a premature end to his Formula One career, Hamilton will one day win the Monaco Grand Prix… His driving style seems tailor-made for the suck-your-teeth-and-just-nail-it nature of the street circuit.
But young Lewis has a lot to learn about being consistently quick and biding time before mounting a challenge to turn a race in his favour. Alonso didn’t drive the wheels off his McLaren to repel Hamilton’s charge… Instead, the Spaniard waited for about 20 laps before he stamped his authority on the race and from that point Hamilton explored the ragged edge to stay in touch with his team-mate, but failed. On Sunday, steadiness and discretion prevailed over flash and fervour – it was poetry.
There may be purists out there who’d argue that McLaren’s team management should have allowed Alonso and Hamilton to duke it out right to the chequered flag and not suggest the duo hold station to secure victory for Woking; After all, it appeared as if the frontrunners regulated their pace after the second round of pit stops. Well, such a “decision” would have been good for the image of the sport and guaranteed that the last quarter of the race would not have been such a frustrating procession, but in my opinion, the outcome of the race would have been the same. Alonso had artfully subdued Hamilton.
As the F1 circus heads for Canada, Ferrari will have to dig deep to gain the ascendancy it appeared to have in the aftermath of the Spanish Grand Prix. The Gilles Villeneuve circuit is completely different to Monaco and the Scuderia will undoubtedly mount a counter offensive in Montreal. However, in the recent past, with the notable exception of the 1996 Monaco Grand Prix (which was won by Olivier Panis in a Ligier) and to a lesser extent, the 2004 race (which was won by Renault’s Jarno Trulli when La Regie was gathering momentum), the team that dominated in Monaco went on to mount a serious challenge for outright honours at season’s end. Ferrari will be all too aware of that!
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