McLaren Feared Alonso would Quit

Recently, Amazon Prime released a new documentary about the McLaren-Honda years, namely the second partnership. In the documentary, it transpired that McLaren feared that double world champion Fernando Alonso would quit the team. The documentary is called ‘Grand Prix Driver’ and it follows McLaren’s progress in early 2017. When the scale of Honda’s engine issues became clearer, they were worried that Alonso would leave at the end of 2017. To make matters worse, it was the third consecutive season that team had an underpowered and unreliable power unit. This drove the wedge between the two, deeper and ultimately resulted in the messy divorce from Honda later in the year.

The documentary is due to release on February 9 and shows how worried McLaren bosses were. They figured that the Spaniard would finally find the limits of his patience and call it a day.

Racing director Eric Boullier said, “After this testing, Fernando is quite pissed off. He is clearly saying I may reconsider my position to race because I’m not going to survive another year like this. “My main worry at this time is not to have the team collapsing. I know the domino effect as well, you know. I mean, in this business you know how it works…when you are weak, people they come, they just poach who they want. It takes years to build an F1 team but you can kill it in six months.”

Such was the concern in the McLaren camp that Boullier thought that Alonso would just bail out of them. The documentary even highlighted Alonso’s safety concerns when driving the McLaren-Honda during the Barcelona sessions. Apparently, he was heard saying, “It’s too dangerous to run like this. Horrible balance with the rear because the driveability was poor. So we cannot test like this. This is a really a [censored] engine. A [censored] power unit you know.”

Even though McLaren feared that Alonso would quit in frustration, in the end, he stayed with the British outfit. It could be said that the decision possibly aided by Zak Brown’s offer to contest the Indy 500. Alonso later penned a deal to remain for 2018. He attributed the decision to the team’s switch from Honda to Renault power for the upcoming season.