Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc walking together in their Mercedes and Ferrari race suits, respectively, at a Formula 1 event.
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Hamilton Should Learn from Alonso’s Struggles to Catch Red Bull

Lewis Hamilton’s move to Ferrari presents a major opportunity for them to usurp Red Bull as the dominant team in Formula One but in an era with fine margins, he will have to ensure that he maintains chemistry with teammate Charles Leclerc that he was unable to find with Fernando Alonso at McLaren in 2007.

Hamilton was a rookie in his first season at McLaren, who had signed double-defending world champion Alonso to race alongside him.

The rivalry between the pair of them became so all-consuming that ultimately, neither of them emerged with the world championship. Rather, Kimi Räikkönen won the world championship by a single point.

Alonso finished fourth in the 2007 Hungarian Grand Prix after being demoted from pole to sixth on the grid for preventing Hamilton from finishing his final flying lap in qualifying. Had he not been demoted, McLaren would have had a monopoly on the grid’s front row.

Hamilton won the race with Raïkkönen finishing second, but had it finished in a McLaren one-two, then one of Hamilton or Alonso would have finished with enough points to clinch the world championship. Ultimately, Raïkkönen finished with 110 points and both McLaren drivers on 109 each.

McLaren ultimately came up empty-handed, as they were unable to claim the drivers’ championship or the constructors’ championship, which they were stripped of due to being found guilty of theft and improper usage of Ferrari’s secret technical information.

In the wake of the Hungarian Grand Prix saga, Alonso had reportedly threatened McLaren boss Ron Dennis over the espionage controversy. He allegedly warned Dennis that he would send his email exchanges with McLaren test driver Pedro de la Rosa and Coughlan to the FIA if not made the team’s official number one driver, as per the Guardian, who quoted Alonso’s manager, Luis Garcia, as denying this allegation. Formula One is certainly a sport never short of controversy, but 2007 was a year beyond comparison.

What, precisely, transpired between Hamilton and Alonso at McLaren is impossible to know beyond doubt. However, Alonso himself has admitted more recently in a DAZN documentary that there was a strained relationship between them which he felt was improperly managed.

In the documentary, titled ‘Fernando. Revealed’, Alonso said: “Now there is another type of rivalry, I don’t think we will be friends in the future or that we will ever have… I think we don’t share many things.

“But it is true that in 2007 the rivalry rose to a higher level.

“We were in the same team, the same garage, we travelled together many times, we were in the meetings and we began to notice that there was this friction, there was tension, we were playing for the World Championship and we were playing each race on Sunday.

“You arrive at the team meeting and you are seeing his telemetry, his ‘on board’ cameras of the car, and that, for example, his car goes a little ahead and when he speaks in the meeting he complains about the rear, things like that.

“So that the team did not take a direction or take a philosophy to develop the car that would be good for both of us, but rather each one was already looking for their own thing, to have that extra advantage, because we were very evenly matched.

“There were many things that broke the relationship harmony of that year. We were young, and immature, I was the first, and we had many clashes.”

On Dennis, Alonso said: “We had a boss who did not know how to control the situation. This would not have happened with Flavio Briatore. Or with Lawrence Stroll.

“There are certain characters in F1 who are respected and others whose drivers have control of the situation. 

​​“In that McLaren of 2007, the drivers had too much control and no one gave us serious warning.”

Hamilton went on to have a serious rivalry with Mercedes teammate Nico Rosberg, too, but the team was so dominant that it ultimately did not cost them anything as a unit.

However, given that competition is stiff at the top this year, with Max Verstappen only narrowly on top of the pile and the likes of Lando Norris and Leclerc capable of challenging, there is a risk that two highly skilled and competitive drivers butting heads in the Ferrari paddock could lead to chaos.

Hamilton was the young driver caught in the middle of Alonso’s rift with McLaren in 2007. Now, as an older and more experienced driver, he has the opportunity to ensure that history doesn’t repeat itself. If he can pull this off, it will significantly boost Ferrari’s chances of Formula One success in 2025.

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