Alonso vs Hamilton

There was an amusing story on BBC online about the current polemic within the McLaren Formula One team. For those of you who haven't been following this, their two drivers and current championship leaders - a cool rookie Brit and a hot-headed double world champion Spaniard (the descriptions are somewhat embellished, but you get the picture) - aren't the best of buddies at the moment. It all came to a head this weekend in Hungary, when Alonso was judged to have intentionally blocked his team-mate during qualifying to prevent Hamilton from completing his final qualifying lap, for which he was demoted four places on the starting grid.

Andrew Benson believes that this is the unfortunate result of McLaren's noble policy of letting their drivers actually race, rather than favouring one over the other (you'd think that Formula One racing is all about drivers competing against each other, but you'd be surprised to know that very little about Formula One racing actually involves 'racing' in any commonly understood sense of the word). He says:

"Like male lions competing for control of a pride, no F1 team is big enough to comfortably contain two sporting alpha males of this stature.

Top racing drivers are intensely driven and complex individuals, and competition from within their own camp is not appreciated."

He then goes on to insightfully disentangle the racing driver's "complex" psyche:

"Their psyche is based on the belief that they are the best - so any challenge to that belief, or the ability to demonstrate it, provokes extreme responses."

which pretty much makes racing drivers sound like baboons. If that's the essence of a complex psyche, I wonder what defines a "simple" person.....

He does, however, point out the great irony that this season is widely considered to be the most compelling in recent years, for reasons that have little to do with racing, and more to do with allegations of spying between teams and childish spats between supposedly grown men. It's not quite reality TV....... but it's close!