The day McLaren almost fired Fernando Alonso
During Fernando Alonso’s first employment at McLarne, he was very nearly dismissed.
The date is August 5, 2007. Two extremely driven men have an office in the F1 paddock at the Hungaroring.
During their talk, they would say things that amounted to treason, rebellion, and almost giving the current World Champion the boot.
The friendship between Ron Dennis and Fernando Alonso did not end abruptly.
As the newly crowned two-time World Champion, Alonso believed he would be the team’s undisputed number one after Kimi Raikkonen left. He joined McLaren in 2007. Lewis Hamilton, a teenage driver, was the only issue with it.
Although Hamilton made his Formula One debut in 2007, McLaren had been following him for a while. No one could have predicted the start the young Briton would make to the season, but he was a product of their junior program and his entry into Formula One was a question of when rather than if.
It was evident right away that Hamilton was the best rookie in decades and wasn’t just there to get experience. He was a legitimate contender for the championship. That did not set well with Alonso.
Alonso had a very difficult year in 2007, and, despite his plea for more support from the club, the request was ignored.
Their future, their apparent heir, and their golden goose were Hamilton. Both drivers’ reputations would suffer, but Alonso believed that, as a two-time World Champion, he should have been treated with more dignity.
The year descended into a haughty one, with both of them employing shady methods to gain the upper hand over their opponent, but things reached a breaking point when a bundle of documents showed up at a photocopier in Woking.
A movie based on the sensational Spygate affair will likely face criticism for being unrealistic.
Frustrated with his lack of advancement at Ferrari, Nigel Stepney attempted to harm the Maranello company by giving private documents to his close friend Mike Coughlan, a top engineer at McLaren.
Coughlan requested his wife Trudy go to a nearby photocopy because he wanted a copy of the documents. If not for one exceptionally observant employee, their plan would have succeeded. The employee lit the figurative fuse when he saw the 780 pages of technical data and called Ferrari.
The events that followed are recorded in F1 history, with McLaren receiving the harshest punishment ever for a sporting mistake. However, the affair had a special effect on Alonso and Dennis’s friendship.
Ron Dennis still maintains that McLaren was acting innocently at the moment, but Alonso, angry at the way the season had gone, threatened to blow up the place.
Alonso set up a meeting with Dennis the morning of the race, pleading to be given priority inside the team after missing out on pole in Hungary over a disagreement with his teammate. At the time, he was two points behind Hamilton.
Alonso vowed to send what he claimed to be damaging documents about Spygate to the FIA after his request was once again denied; Dennis did not take Alonso’s threat lightly.
Feeling enraged, Dennis proceeded to get Martin Whitmarsh and requested that Alonso reiterate the warning, which the Spaniard dutifully did. Whitmarsh and Dennis were crystal clear about what needed to happen once Alonso left: Alonso had to be fired right away.
Max Mosley was the only one who was able to save Alonso that day.
Years later, Dennis claimed, “He uttered things that he subsequently and fully retracted.”
He mentioned emails from a McLaren engineer specifically in the passage of content. I told him to stop when he said that. Fernando repeated all of his statements in front of his management after I left and brought Mr. Whitmarsh inside.
