Fernando Alonso Was Right to Join McLaren Despite Apparent Ferrari Progress
As Sebastian Vettel crossed the line to finish third in Formula One's season-opening Australian Grand Prix, those of a sympathetic disposition may have spared a thought for Fernando Alonso.
The Spaniard, no doubt watching the race from the comfort of his Oviedo home, will have witnessed his former team doing something they hadn't done since 2008—beating both Williams and Red Bull on raw pace alone.
To add insult to injury, he will have then seen Jenson Button, his 2015 team-mate at McLaren, trail home two laps down in the woefully uncompetitive MP4-30. Kevin Magnussen, standing in for the injured two-time champion, didn't even make it to the start.
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But such sympathy, were it directed, will have been misplaced. Alonso doesn't need it and almost certainly doesn't want it.
Alonso left Ferrari at the end of 2014 after five frustrating years. Though he twice challenged for the title, he did so in cars which had no business being near the front.
The last time the Scuderia built a genuine title-challenging car was in 2008—two years before Alonso joined.
Having been forced to watch as first Red Bull, then Mercedes dominated the sport and claimed the titles, the man who last won the championship in 2006 decided he'd had enough.
Here was a driver with a racing ability at the very least equal to any of his modern-day peers, into his 33rd year and desperately craving a third world title. Rather than hope against hope that the plodding Ferrari dinosaur would somehow turn things around, he elected to join McLaren.
Of course, this was something of a risk.
The Woking team were also enduring a bit of a dry spell. Their 2013 and 2014 cars were, by and large, worse than the Ferraris Alonso had been driving in those seasons, and in rekindling their historic relationship with Honda, McLaren were losing the dominant Mercedes engine.
But the feeling was that the team were moving in the right direction. Renowned aerodynamicist Peter Prodromou was arriving from Red Bull, Honda were ploughing a lot of resources into their new power unit and proven winner Ron Dennis was back in charge.
So at the time, joining McLaren seemed no more a risk than remaining with Ferrari. He was replaced by four-time champion Vettel.
Pre-season testing arrived, and with it came a host of problems for McLaren. Honda had somehow managed to do a worse job than Renault did at the start of 2014, and as a result, the team were unable to do any meaningful running at either the first or second tests.
Compounding McLaren's problems, Alonso experienced a mysterious crash on the final day of the second test, sustaining a concussion which forced him to miss the third.
Kevin Magnussen was called up to replace him, and though the team did more laps at the final test, the times were not impressive. As recorded by the official Formula 1 website, the quickest lap set by an MP4-30 in Barcelona was 2.4 seconds slower than the winter-best one minute, 22.792 second lap set by Mercedes' Nico Rosberg.
Meanwhile, Ferrari appeared to have made a step forward under their new leadership.
The Scuderia dominated the opening test, and though they fell back into the battle to be best of the rest by the time testing was done, this still represented an apparent improvement from where they ended 2014.
The Australian Grand Prix weekend confirmed the struggling McLaren/improved Ferrari story, and it would be reasonable to think Alonso, absent due to his testing injury, may now be regretting his decision to leave Italy for England.
The Scuderia were, after all, the second-quickest team. Best of the rest, head of the chasing pack, ready to take the fight to the Silver Arrows, and so on and so forth.
But if we step back and take a really good look at the weekend, Ferrari haven't made that much progress at all. Not so far as their ultimate goal is concerned, anyway.
Statistics are well-known for not painting the whole picture, and this one certainly doesn't. The two races were very different; one had two Mercedes cruising along at the front and the other had one, Alonso in 2014 lost more time behind a slower car than Vettel in 2015, the safety cars came out at different times and the strategies were different.
Oh, and one is Alonso, the other is Vettel.
But the main point of the statistic is very much valid. For all the gains they've made on the engine side and in spite of all the happy faces in the garage, Ferrari are still absolutely nowhere near Mercedes over a race distance.
Per the FIA race history chart, Vettel was 14.233 seconds behind winner Lewis Hamilton at the halfway point of the race, Lap 29, on tyres one lap older. By the time the chequered flag fell at the end of Lap 58, the gap was 34.523 seconds.
This half of the race should be more representative than the first, as both were in clean air, on new Pirelli mediums and uninterrupted by safety cars.
During this time, Vettel lost 20.290 seconds. That's an average of seven tenths of a second per lap—and the gap was even greater in qualifying.
Fourth-placed Vettel, the quickest of the Ferraris, was a staggering 1.430 seconds slower than pole-sitter Hamilton. Kimi Raikkonen was 0.033 seconds slower than Vettel.
Even if we award the two Ferraris half a second—the three-tenths Raikkonen says, per ESPN, he lost at Turn 3 on his Q3 hot lap and a tenth each for the next two corners—the gulf is still around nine tenths.
They're not going to make up that sort of gap to a team like Mercedes.
That said, there's no denying that, compared to McLaren, at this stage Ferrari are in a very good position; most drivers on the grid would indeed feel a little stupid had they swapped red for silver.
But not a driver whose only goal is the title.
Second-best is still first of the losers, and—barring a genuine miracle—Australia proved that "first loser" is all Ferrari can hope to be this year. For someone of Alonso's stature and ability, at the career stage he is at, it doesn't matter if he's fighting for third, fourth, sixth or ninth.
None of those places are good enough. Of course he'll drive as hard as he can and fight for every position—see Silverstone last year for proof—but at the end of the day all he wants is the championship.
If he can't have that, it doesn't really matter where he finishes.
So there's no reason for the Alonso to look at Ferrari's Australian performance with envy, because there's nothing to be envious of. Were he sat in the SF15-T, he'd be just as miserable as he was in the F14-T, watching a couple of silver cars vanish into the distance.
Maybe he'd get an extra lap or two's sight of the W06's rear wing, but the final outcome would be the same.
Ferrari are not going to win the title in 2015, and unless Mercedes slip up, they're not even going to win a race. Chances are, when Renault finally get their act together, they'll be in a three-way scrap for a single, left-over podium position. Hardly the stuff of Alonso's dreams.
The first year with McLaren was always going to be tough, and tough it is certainly proving to be.
But with the quality they have in place and having not yet shown what their 2015 car can do, McLaren have just as much chance of making the step up to fight Mercedes in 2016 as Ferrari.
Maybe, if the MP4-30 turns out to be as good as it looks once Honda have fixed their issues, they have more chance.
Alonso's time at Ferrari had run its course; the time was right for a change and, even after what we saw in Australia, the switch to Woking was still the right move to make.
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