Dodgy Business

I have to confess to be still wondering about what I witnessed in Budapest. All season Ron Dennis has played down any hint of a feud between his two drivers. In Hungary, it boiled over in the most spectacular way.

"There just isn't an issue," Ron said at Indianapolis, when all the evidence suggested that there was.

Alonso, at that stage, was still doing his best to disguise any problems. As we celebrated the 60th birthday of long-serving British journalist Alan Henry with a piece of Mercedes cream cake (for breakfast!) on Friday morning, Ron came across to share some friendly banter with Alan, a long-time friend.

Sat at the next table was Fernando and his manager, Luis Garcia. Ron wasted little time in going over to sit and have what looked like a friendly chat. Whether there was a problem or not, relations had clearly not broken down totally. They were still speaking at that stage.

It no longer appears to be the case. When Alonso won brilliantly at Nurburgring, Dennis was seen congratulating Alonso and speaking to him in the immediate post-race moments, both before and after Fernando got verbally stuck into Massa.

Fernando Alonso and Ron Dennis in parc ferme at the Nurburgring © LAT

I was hardly alone in noticing that Alonso appeared to totally blank his team boss.

This came just a day after Dennis had again tried to convince everyone that all in the garden was rosy. In Germany he did this by showing everyone the latest Mercedes-Benz TV advert, featuring Lewis and Fernando.

Alonso had apparently gotten a little grumpy over the amount of time it took to shoot, but the end result was good.

The two drivers are shown in various humorous situations - eyeing up a girl, checking into a hotel, trying to be first to the room, outdoing each other in the gym, lasting longest in the sauna, etc.

It is all played out to the 'anything you can do, I can do better' theme. I'd quietly suggest that it has probably been wasted money or at least a sizeable outlay for a very limited shelf life...

If Senna and Prost was tempestuous, McLaren at least got two years out of the sport's most volatile pairing. It would astonish me if Ron got two years of Fernando and Lewis, contracts or no.

Dennis looked like a man badly in need of his impending holiday during the Budapest weekend. He was probably only half joking when he threw up his hands in the midst of the qualifying furore and said, 'anybody want this job?'

Who knows what is truly going on behind the scenes. I have my suspicions and, if they are confirmed, the road could get an awful lot rockier for Dennis before it smoothes out.

The first thing that was odd in that seismic Budapest four days was Alonso not appearing as scheduled in the Thursday press conference.

Considering that the FIA has not long since asked teams to ensure that their drivers and personnel respect the timings on pain of fines, it was a surprise to find the world champion missing entirely - specially in view of the announcement that the Stepneygate saga was going to an FIA court of appeal.

A lot of hacks wanted to know what Fernando thought about that.

Fernando Alonso in the post-qualifying FIA press conference © XPB/LAT

The governing body put out a release saying that it had agreed to a team request that Alonso be excused. Which, of course, fanned the fire. Why? What was the problem?

It was assumed that this was McLaren doing the professional thing - sparing Fernando more tedious questioning on an issue that was distracting and in no way under his control.

But Kimi was there to put the Ferrari viewpoint even if, as usual, he was less than effusive. The general feeling was that McLaren had gone OTT.

Later, it was suggested to me that the reason the team did not want Alonso to attend ran much deeper than that. Communications had totally broken down, Dennis had no control over the world champion, and who knows what he was planning to say.

The inference was that Fernando might have said something prejudicial to McLaren's case in the FIA Court of Appeal hearing.

At first I didn't buy into that. Even supposing there was something he could say that might be damaging to the team, why would he?

But, Friday morning, I wondered about it again when Flavio Briatore entertained the Italian media for more than an hour in the middle of practice. Flavio stirred the pot with his biggest available spoon, and all the Italian Saturday papers were full of stories about how he thought McLaren should be punished.

If you're wondering why, it's to do with Ferrari's experience of optimising Bridgestone tyre usage without going down blind alleys.

Briatore's timing was a little suspicious. The Renault team have been making noises about how much they would like to have Alonso back, and they are unlikely to be the only ones in the paddock deeply interested by the world champion being totally at odds with his current employer.

My mind went back to 1994 when Michael Schumacher, tainted by Benetton cheating allegations (launch/traction control, missing fuel filters) used the situation to negotiate release from his contract a year early to join Ferrari. Alonso allegedly spoke with Briatore more than once over the Hungarian weekend.

McLaren, certainly, had the appearance of a team bending over backwards to help Fernando. Whatever the rights and wrongs of Hamilton failing to allow Alonso past at the start of Q3, Dennis still publicly defended Alonso in front of the media after a blatant professional foul that hurt his own team.

Flavio Briatore © LAT

In among it all, cleverly, without accusing McLaren directly of any wrongdoing, was the observation that if Renault had known the size of Ferrari's fuel tank and it's weight distribution - just those two details - it could have built a much more competitive car, much more quickly.

Knowing Ron at all, you knew how much that would grate, and yet he made noises about the team doing a bad job.

As many suspected, Fernando did seem to be totally out of control and you thought back to the missed Thursday conference.

When Dennis had finished explaining away the reasons that the double world champion was hacked off with Hamilton/the team, he turned to Alonso and asked if that had been an accurate rendition of events. Alonso, chewing a pear, did not even afford his team boss the courtesy of eye contact, nodded his head and gave a thumbs-up. It came across as disrespectful and a bit churlish.

At any time in the F1 paddock there is information and disinformation by the bucket load.

One tidbit put about by the Italian media was that Alonso was seeking to leave McLaren because one of the reasons he joined in the first place was supposed to be an assurance that Renault would not be continuing.

He was also allegedly led to believe that the team would be centred around him, within their usual parameters of operation.

I put the question of whether Alonso had gone to McLaren under false pretences to the Spaniard's management and I did not get a direct response, which led me to believe that he had not.

While the Alonso camp is not slow to point out that their man could be harmed by any anti-McLaren verdict from the FIA Court of Appeal, I do not believe that they are seeking to leave McLaren. Given the machinery at Fernando's disposal, after all, it would not be an obvious strategy.

What I believe is that they are much more interested in being at McLaren without Lewis Hamilton, and would like to engineer that situation if at all possible.

Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton celebrate their 1-2 in the Monaco Grand Prix © LAT

Someone close to it all told me not to assume that it is Fernando who might be in a Renault in 2007. The implication was that it could be Lewis. I find that entirely fanciful, but Alonso takes absolutely no prisoners on the track and you do wonder to what lengths he may go to serve his own ends off it.

Alonso's unhappiness was kicked off by Monaco, where Hamilton's post-race reaction led to an FIA enquiry. It was compounded by the team's insistence on equal strategy which, the Alonso camp maintains, means that you are only effectively racing your teammate and not optimising your chances against Ferrari.

Alonso, as a double reigning champion, feels he deserves better than that. Then there is the reverence with which Hamilton is regarded at Woking which, it is said, sometimes causes Fernando to feel that he is Public Enemy Number One, if not team number one.

What you do ponder is whether Dennis, if he fails to commit to one of them, stands to lose both Alonso and Hamilton. The laws of supply and demand, and the fact that a driver needs a car more than vice versa, would tend to militate against that, but you do wonder.

And what about Ferrari, one of the catalysts in all this? Is their line-up secure? Over breakfast in Budapest, someone who professed to have a good inside line told me that Luca di Montezemolo, tiring of wider politics in Italy, might soon prefer to concentrate more of his personal attentions on Ferrari now that it is once again more 'Italian' in structure.

And Luca's dream team, it is said, is Raikkonen and Alonso...