Posted by: Stuminator
Waiting for McLaren Honda to tell Alonso to shut his trap. Same comments about how he is so good & the power unit is crap. Dude is functioning as his own PR firm. I still think he's the best driver in F1 (top 3 anyways), but c'mon bud, you don't have to tell anyone & everyone who will listen repeatedly.
Should be interesting to see how team orders shape up with the way standings are & the results of Russian qualifying.
He's mechanically one of the top drivers, and has been for quite a long time. When the car underperforms as badly as it does, he can constantly claim he's driving the best he has in his life, and nobody notices or cares. The reason he isn't in a championship winning ride is primarily the stuff you've mentioned, so yes I agree completely. If he was just bummed out, then the smart move would be to constantly explain that he feels super bad for Vandoorne, who basically has finished only half the races and participated in at best half of the practice sessions during race weekends.
To be honest, I'm a bit surprised McLaren didn't cut him loose sooner - Fernando could go and race WEC in Ferraris and stack trophies every year, McLaren could run Stoffel and somebody like Felipe Nasr (or keep Jenson in the car if they insist on paying out tons of money for driving talent when the car isn't up to scratch). Clearly they're thinking much bigger picture with the entire endeavor, and I guess when the road car side of the business is going great there's no immediate impetus to stop being inefficient, but it does strike me as a bit odd.
Similar deal with why the Honda-Sauber deal is only coming through for 2018. That should have been an immediate thing, so that there would be 4 cars worth of data made available (and now that Sahara Force India has outgrown McLaren as a parent team and no longer needed to run customer transmissions and get technical aid, Sauber or MRT was an obvious choice)