McLaren chief Ron Dennis has moved to diffuse the latest row between his world-championship-chasing drivers Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton.
The McLaren pair were involved in a thrilling battle at the first corner of Sunday’s Belgian Grand Prix that ended with Alonso forcing a charging Hamilton to take evasive action and swerve temporarily off the track.
Hamilton never had another opportunity to pass Alonso, and their third and fourth place finishes mean the Spaniard is now just two points behind his 22-year-old rookie rival in the drivers’ championship.
Kimi Raikkonen won the race for Ferrari, but the main talking point afterwards was Hamilton’s fury at what he saw as unreasonably aggressive defence from Alonso.
Dennis, though, has downplayed the incident and suggested that Alonso was well within his rights to deny Hamilton any room to pass him on the outside of the track.
”I was not concerned at all,” Dennis said. ”They were racing. If it were two different cars, you wouldn’t think twice about it. It was absolutely no problem.
”When you have two great drivers like Fernando and Lewis fighting for the world championship, you have to expect manoeuvres like we saw at the start, which are a result of both being extremely competitive.”
Hamilton did not quite see the incident that way, insisting that Alonso’s actions in Spa were unfair and even hypocritical.
He said: ”For the last few years I have been watching Formula One and Fernando is always complaining about other people being unfair. But he really cut across and pushed me wide. It was quite deliberate. I could see it. If I had held my position, we would have collided.
”I didn’t feel it was fair. I felt there was room for all of us [on the track], but somehow I ran out.”
Alonso was unwilling to acknowledge the incident had been controversial in any way. The Spaniard argued, like Dennis, that it was just a normal racing incident. ”Today it was just coincidence that we started third and fourth, so we arrived at the first corner together,” he argued.
Perhaps if constructors’ points, and the financial rewards that go with them, would have been at stake on Sunday, Dennis would have taken a different view of Alonso’s tactics.
But after McLaren’s expulsion from the constructors’ championship on Thursday, the 60-year-old team principal no longer has to worry about his drivers collecting team points and is now free to sit back and enjoy the climax to what has been a thrilling season.
”We have a great world championship with both McLaren drivers at the top of the table, and I am looking forward to the next three races,” he added. ”We have worked hard and have shown 100% reliability in the races with our cars so far this year and the entire team look forward to the rest of the season.” — Sapa-AFP