Dodgy Business

I couldn't help but smile when I noticed Fernando Alonso mischievously ramping up a bit more pressure on Lewis Hamilton last Sunday night. Yes, he said, he'd be helping Felipe Massa if the opportunity arose.

Lewis has enough to worry about without Fernando sticking his oar in and this coming weekend at Shanghai promises to be fascinating. If Fuji is any barometer, Alonso and Renault are now almost quick enough to be a nuisance.

It's looked that way for the last couple of races, not just in Japan. Alonso owed his Singapore victory either to extreme good fortune or devious team planning, depending on your take, but he was already fast. He'd been quick on Friday and fastest of all on Saturday morning before a fuel feed problem at the start of Q2 left him throwing up his arms to the heavens.

Nobody at Fuji wanted to say so on the record, but many teams thought that Renault had carefully plotted Alonso's Singapore win and were very suspicious that Nelson Piquet had crashed at precisely the right moment to trigger the safety car which swung the race towards Alonso.

The damaged remains of the Renault of Nelsinho Piquet © LAT

Just to recap, Fernando, who'd been quick, had qualified 15th by dint of not recording a Q2 time. Piquet, meanwhile, had not made it out of Q1 and lined up 16th.

Normally, faced with Alonso's situation, a team will fuel up and run a long first stint one-stopper in the attempt to make up track position on some of the two-stopping cars and those one stoppers doing shorter first stints. To be aggressive on strategy (i.e. lightly fuelled) will generally only work on a track where overtaking is easy, which certainly wasn't the case in Singapore.

Alonso said they did it because the brakes were running hot all weekend and would not cope with a heavy one-stop fuel load, so they tried something very different. His first stop, on lap 12 of the 61, was very early. The explanation was that Fernando had started on the softer tyre, which was about 0.7s slower than the hard, and wanted to get onto the prime as soon as possible.

On the lap after Fernando's stop, Piquet received a radio instruction, "Push, Nelson!" At the time he was still stuck down in 16th position behind Barrichello's Honda, where he'd been from the start, so the instruction itself didn't seem to make a whole lot of sense. Coded instruction, it has been suggested.

On the very next lap, Piquet gyrated into the wall and brought out the safety car. Admittedly, he shunted far more heavily than was perhaps ideal, but you do have to leave some debris to be sure of a safety car and all the better to make it look good. Certainly you'd need to do a much better job than Michael Schumacher's pathetic effort at Rascasse in Monaco a couple of years ago. That was as transparent as they come.

Rosberg and Kubica were forced to pit under the safety car, attracting drive-through penalties as a result of this year's regulations. It proved that the first scheduled stints by anyone other than Alonso had been laps 14 and 15. Most teams know pretty well when the opposition are going to stop, so Alonso's lap 12 arrival was both as early as it legitimately could be, and as late as possible if the 'plan' was to work.

One team strategist I spoke to in Japan put it like this: "Looking at it from a purely statistical point of view, on a track like Singapore, stopping on lap 12 is not aggressive, it's stupid. It's something which cannot work. Your grandmother wouldn't do it. Then, it's true that stopping on lap 12 is the only way to open up a two-lap gap when the safety car will benefit only one car - the one that has stopped. And then, when you create this two-lap window and in it your teammate crashes... If you add up all the probabilities, you end up with a figure that is very close to zero."

I guess we'll probably never know, but you've got to smile. If there's a team in the paddock sharp enough and brazen enough to think it all through and then actually go out and make it work, it's probably Flav's old Benetton boys.

Spare a thought for poor Jarno Trulli, on whose shoulders the responsibility to take on Alonso and Renault had fallen as Toyota battled to maintain its fourth place in the constructors' championship.

Trulli had qualified 11th and Toyota had fuelled him up heavy for a one-stopper. The TF108 is not the greatest thing over bumps to start with, and Singapore was very bumpy. Bumpy to the extent that two or three drivers were complaining about headaches after one practice session.

Jarno Trulli leads Nico Rosberg, Kazuki Nakajima, and Fernando Alonso in the early laps of the Grand Prix of Singapore © LAT

In that first stint, something of a Trulli train had formed as Jarno fought manfully with the Toyota. He was almost a minute behind Massa's leading Ferrari after just 10 laps and was lapping about five seconds off a good two-stopping pace. Alonso was one of those who managed to hustle past him. Having driven like a hero and managed to keep the thing out of the wall, Trulli did look set for some decent points when, with ten laps to go, a hydraulic problem put him out. When he climbed out he looked absolutely spent.

He then had to watch as Alonso, beaming from ear to ear, mounted the top step of the podium. The difference between fourth and fifth place in the constructors championship is hardly going to derail Toyota's F1 programme, but it's a significant amount of dollars. You couldn't help but think A Fistful of Dollars as the corporate straight players were left empty-handed in the desert while Flav, Fernando & co hitched up their ponchos and road away with the swag to the strains of Ennio Morricone.

There weren't many that the coincidences passed by. Killing time between Fuji and Shanghai, I'm sad to have to report that you can find yourself in a Tokyo karaoke bar. One of the photographers chose Abba's Fernando. "Can you hear the boos, Fernando?" he began. "There was someone in the wall that night, it wasn't right, Fernando..." etcetera. That got a good few titters, as did the Jenson Button song, "Help me Honda, help help me Honda," an obvious reworking of the Beach Boys classic.

Whatever you make of the goings on at Fuji, it was good to see Alonso back at the sharp end of a race won very definitely on merit. Okay, the first corner did him a favour, but after that Fernando was his old relentless self when given half a sniff of a win. Some of the high-speed consistency was mind-boggling and the car clearly had more pace than BMW and Kubica could handle. Alonso's car has always had a body language all its own and it belongs at the front of a grand prix.

Shortly after the news broke at Fuji that Force India may run a customer McLaren in 2009, I bumped into a McLaren man in the paddock. How many clauses in the contract stating they can't put Fernando Alonso in it, I wanted to know.