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[LiamCatterson]

He didn't give his own boss a grape but allows everyone else to

[spankyham]

Lots of interesting tweets going around, one that RB's chief mechanic Kenny Handkammer has just resigned with immediate effect.

Other news is that Ferrari have just acquired a STR mechanic with ties to Seb from his earlier days there.

Supposedly a quote from LcDM in Paris yesterday "One must be able to cope with changes and we are proud to close an important cycle. He (Alonso) gave everything and did extraordinary performances. We all thought and hoped we could achieve better results together."

Could the plan be 2015 Kimi and Jules and get the car to be competitive
2016 Seb joins Jules for what Ferrari plans to be a culmination point for the current development plan.

[Jabberwocky]

http://www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/116138

Hope Alonso is not handing out sour grapes in that photo.

[sagi58]

It sounds like a decision arrived at mutually.
Ferrari can't give Alonso what he needs right now, that is a competitive car.
And, Alonso can't wait until Ferrari can.

Irreconcilable differences, eh?

Hopefully, both sides will do so with class.

[Jabberwocky]

Isn't this the 1st time Alonso has left a team not under a cloud ?

Sent from my GT-S5830 using Tapatalk 2

[sagi58]

Does it matter?

[spankyham]

There was a cloud when he left Renault on crashgate. To this day we don't know the whole truth surrounding that event. That would be the only cloud over him IMO.
There were a lot of people angry with him when he left McLaren, because he finally came clean and told the truth. Not the last time a McLaren driver has lied about something then come clean and told the truth. When Fernando finally revealed the truth he was about the only person at McLaren who stepped out from under a cloud.
It was a travesty IMO that McLaren never had to dip into their pockets to pay even a penny for their sin and that the FiA never went ahead and checked their '08 car as they had committed to Ferrari.

[sagi58]

The FIA made a commitment to Ferrari and didn't honour it?
WoW!
How did that ever miss the front pages of the conspiracy
section of all the big name F1 websites?
Oh... I know... it was Ferrari that got the short end of that!!

[sagi58]

To quote Yul Brynner:

, Jonathan Noble wrote:">Fernando Alonso finalises switch to McLaren F1 team
Fernando Alonso's switch to the McLaren Formula 1 team is set to be confirmed before the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, once the team knows who his team-mate will be.

Sources close to the Woking-based outfit have revealed that Alonso has now finalised a big-money move from Ferrari to McLaren next year, renewing a partnership that ended prematurely in 2007 after a tumultuous campaign.

His decision to accept McLaren's overtures has, however, forced the team into making a difficult decision between Jenson Button and Kevin Magnussen for the seat alongside him...

...It is suggested that Alonso would prefer for Button to remain on board next year because it would help accelerate the team's push towards the front of the grid.

However, financial factors could also play a role in the decision, with Magnussen being a much cheaper option for the team...

[sagi58]

He may not be with Ferrari next year; but, Alonso surely still has pride in a job well done...

, Jonathan Noble wrote:">Brazilian GP – Fernando Alonso: “The position I deserve”

“After a far from easy weekend, I am reasonably pleased with the outcome of the race, because even if we weren’t very competitive, we managed to score a good number of points. Today, degradation was particularly high, especially in the first stint on the Softs, which lasted less time than expected because of graining.

When I passed Kimi, my tyres were newer than his, as he was on a two stop, but I was having to save fuel and after that overtaking move, there was nothing more I could do.

Now there’s just one race to go this season and in terms of the Constructors’ Championship, we hope to manage to keep McLaren behind us in the final race in Abu Dhabi.

As for myself, I reckon I’m in the position I deserve, because others have done better.”

[Ferrari man 009]

Ferrari have officially confirmed that Alonso will leave the team at the end of the season.

Thanks for all your efforts in red Fernando!

[sagi58]

Yes, very definitely, a huge thanks for everything, Alonso!!

I honestly thought he would lead us out of the "dark"!!
So sad our collective dream didn't come true.
I'm sure he's just as disappointed as any of us; but,
in the end, he has to be a realist.

I just hope he's wrong about how long it may take!

[sagi58]

 wrote:">Thank you Fernando
Maranello, 20 November 2014

Scuderia Ferrari and Fernando Alonso announce that, by common consent, they have ended their relationship. Fernando Alonso leaves the team at the end of this season, after a five year period which, with one race remaining, saw him score 1186 points, 44 podiums and 11 wins.

Everyone at Scuderia Ferrari thanks Fernando for his great contribution on both a personal and professional level. “In the Scuderia Ferrari roll of honour of great drivers, Fernando Alonso will always occupy a special place” – commented Scuderia Ferrari Team Principal, Marco Mattiacci. “We offer him our heartfelt thanks for what has been an extraordinary adventure with the Scuderia, when in the past five years, he twice came so close to winning the world championship. I am sure that a great driver like Fernando will always hold the Prancing Horse dear to his heart and I also expect the Ferrari fans will continue to hold him in high regard in his future endeavours.”

“Today is not an easy one for me, because even if I always look to the future with great enthusiasm and determination, at the end of this season my journey as a Ferrari driver will come to an end” – said Fernando Alonso. “It was a difficult decision to take, but a carefully considered one and from start to finish, my love for Ferrari was a prime consideration. I have always been lucky enough to make my own decisions about my future and I have that possibility now too. I must thank the team for that, as it understood my position. I leave Scuderia Ferrari after five years, during which I reached my very best level professionally, tackling major challenges that pushed me to find new limits. I also proved to be a true team-player, putting the interests of the Scuderia before my own.

When I had to take important decisions about my future, I did so with Ferrari in my heart, driven by my love for the team. I am very proud of what we have achieved together. Thanks to the efforts of the men and women of Maranello, on three occasions we came second in the Formula 1 World Championship, two of them fighting for the title right up to and including the final race, running in a championship winning position for many laps. Without a shadow of a doubt, these five years produced some of the best moments of my career and I also feel that, in leaving the team, it is family rather than friends I am leaving behind.

Now I look to the future with great enthusiasm, knowing that part of my heart will always belong to the Prancing Horse. I want to thank each and everyone of the team for the trust they showed in me.”'

[sagi58]

As "they" say, all things come to an end.
I just wish the ending had been happier
for everyone involved!!

Arrivederci, Alonso!!
Buona fortuna!!

[sagi58]

Thanks to Ferrari man for posting this link in the general forum.
I thought I'd isolate both Kimi and Alonso for us to discuss in 2014
and I've isolated Vettel for us to look into 2015!

2014 model-based driver rankings

2014 was a year completely dominated by the Mercedes team, with the barest sniff of the title for Ricciardo. But who would have won the title if all cars had been equal? Were the Mercedes drivers the year’s best performers, or would other drivers have looked even better behind the wheel of a Mercedes? That’s a question you could debate for hours. Alternatively, we can pose the question to a mathematical model, such as the one I previously used to estimate all-time driver rankings.

In a nutshell, my model ignores races for each driver where they had non-driver failures (e.g., mechanical DNFs), then uses points per race in each of the remaining races as a performance metric for each season. While this is not a perfect metric (e.g., it doesn’t assign blame for crashes), it does capture one of the most important aspects of driver performance, and it can be easily applied across the board to all historical races without any subjective interpretation. Note that the model uses a scoring system based on the 10-6-4-3-2-1 system and includes fractional points for all lower race positions, allowing it to differentiate between drivers who finish 13th and 19th, for example.

Performance is assumed to be a function of both the driver’s performance and their team’s performance. Using the race results from 1950-2014, the model estimates the performance of each driver and each team so as to statistically best fit the race result data. This is possible because drivers are connected to one another by many different teammates, allowing their relative performances to be estimated.

2014 driver rankings

Using my model, I ranked the driver performances of 2014. Rankings are quantified by the adjusted points per race (ppr) up to a maximum of 10 ppr, as described previously. Each driver is discussed below. Note that the 2014 Marussia team and their drivers Jules Bianchi and Max Chilton were unranked, because to date Chilton and Bianchi have only driven alongside each other, so they cannot be compared to others. All other drivers are connected via common teammates. For the sake of completeness, I note that if we make the crude assumption that Marussia and Caterham were equal in performance in 2014, then the model ranks Chilton 17th and Bianchi 9th.


1. Fernando Alonso, 9.13 ppr



It has been a remarkable year for Fernando Alonso, reminiscent of Senna’s 1993 or Schumacher’s 1996. The 2014 Ferrari was hopelessly underpowered and difficult to handle. It belonged in midfield, where his world champion teammate spent his season, finishing between 6th and 12th in all but one of his races. Alonso finished in the top 5 eight times and astoundingly almost won in Hungary despite being caught by the safety car just after he had passed the pit-lane. Alonso dragged his car into places it simply shouldn’t have been, routinely battling wheel-to-wheel with Red Bulls and McLarens. In Austria, he even came close to catching Williams in what he described as his best race of the season. Without Alonso’s contribution, the model thinks Ferrari would have been a distant 6th in the constructors’ championship (see Bottas’s entry above).

Before 2014, Alonso’s brilliant career already put him among the all-time greats. The model rates him the 3rd greatest driver since 1950, behind only Jim Clark and Jackie Stewart, and marginally ahead of Michael Schumacher. This year further cemented his legacy. In the same car, he made a world champion look completely ordinary. Overall, Alonso beat Raikkonen 16-1 in races and 16-3 in qualifying. In qualifying, Alonso was on average 0.53 seconds ahead. In races that both finished, Alonso was on average 33 seconds ahead. One has to look back to Prost’s 1986 domination of Keke Rosberg — another Finnish champion struggling to adapt to turbo engines and fuel-saving — to find a double champion duo that delivered such lopsided results.

One of Alonso’s greatest strengths is his ability to manipulate and provoke the car on corner entry, which he exploited to help tame the unruly F14T. Different cars respond to different types of manipulation; Alonso is adaptable enough to employ whichever methods the vehicle demands. In the mid-2000s on Michelin tyres, he mastered an extremely violent turn-in that looked foreign to Formula 1. Rapidly increasing the front slip angle caused a dynamic response, giving the car some initial attitude followed by sudden induced understeer, with the front then sliding on the approach to the apex. If the car bit more than expected, his famously fast hands were ready to catch any oversteer. There’s a superb explanation of this peculiar but massively quick driving style in this article.

With the Pirellis tolerating less slip angle than the Michelins and having a tendency to fall to pieces if provoked too much, Alonso has been gentler in his initial steering input in recent years. However, he has continued to use his feet to manipulate the car on entry. For most of his career, Alonso has had a tendency to briefly tap the throttle (up to about 5-10% throttle) at the end of the braking phase, just before arriving at the apex. This helps to rotate the car into the corner, setting it up for a straighter and therefore faster exit, which is particularly important with the monstrous torque engines of 2014. This is a stylistic choice, which doesn’t suit every car or driver. Ricciardo is another fan of the gentle throttle tap, while Hamilton uses a style more closely aligned with Schumacher’s, progressively releasing brakes, dialing in steering, and easing in throttle to achieve a neutral premeditated slide at the apex all in one fluid movement, rather than jabbing the car into sliding with the throttle. Bottas doesn’t tap the throttle, but gets on it very early, introduces it progressively, and then reacts to any excess oversteer generated on exit. Raikkonen has typically been closer to Hamilton/Schumacher in his throttle application and much prefers a car to respond sensitively to his inputs on corner entry, rather than needing blunt manipulation.

One of the most impressive aspects of Alonso’s season was the lack of any serious errors in a car that frequently brought Raikkonen unstuck. Although Alonso spent the year savagely battling other cars, he made fewer errors than the Mercedes pair, who were usually on their own out front. As shown in the graph below, the model ranks Alonso’s performances over the last several years at Renault and Ferrari a significant margin ahead of his main championship competitors. The difference is comparable to Schumacher’s performance advantage over his competitors in the 1990s.



Interestingly, there are no signs of Alonso slowing down, with stable performances since 2008. The model rates 2014 Alonso’s 2nd best year, narrowly ahead of 2005, 2006, and 2012. The only higher-rated performance was 2009, a year in which Alonso scored all of Renault’s 26 points.

One way of visualizing Alonso’s impressively stable form is to look at how his race performances have varied over time. For each of the six drivers who have been active since 2007, I took all race results relative to their teammates, excluding races where either driver had a mechanical DNF. Using a sliding window 9 races long, I calculated the fraction of races in which they beat their teammate. Alonso’s record is shown below.



Following his difficult start to 2007, where he seemed to have difficulty adapting from Michelin tyres and Hitco brakes to the rounder-profile Bridgestone tyres and the stiffer Carbon Industrie brakes, Alonso has consistently beaten his teammates around 60-100% of the time.

Compare that to Hamilton, whose form seems less stable by comparison. He has gone through three difficult phases over the same time period: late 2007, 2011, and late 2013. Hamilton has always been his own worst enemy, so it will be interesting to observe whether his seemingly heightened maturity will carry forward into 2015.



Vettel’s fortunes have also risen and fallen. While he dominated Mark Webber overall, there were relative dips in 2009, 2010, and 2012.



Rosberg had a slight dip in his performance relative to Nakajima in 2008. He then ran into progressively more difficulties against Schumacher across 2010-2012.



Button had a temporary up-turn in his performances relative to Barrichello in early 2009, which helped carry him to the championship by cashing in on points when Brawn were at their best. Against Hamilton, he had a temporary gain in 2011 as Hamilton slumped. He then dominated Perez in early 2013, but had less of an advantage later in the year.



Finally, Massa showed an enormous relative improvement to Raikkonen in 2008. He then fell progressively backwards relative to Alonso, before relatively gaining on Bottas in late 2014.



Alonso’s very stable form across multiple teams, multiple teammates, and multiple waves of technical changes is phenomenally impressive. If McLaren-Honda can deliver a championship contending car, expect him to be there ready to snatch the title.