My opinion on the thread question is "no".
That out of the way, your posts raise the obvious question a) do you think in his time at Ferraro Alonso has been bad for the team and b) what driver do you believe could do a better job with the cars available?
First of all let me say that Alonso has IMO been one of the best, if not the best driver this year. His driving quality at Ferrari has been in general great.
But to a) For example, when he lost the WDC in 2010. That was mainly blamed on the strategy call that Ferrari made at Abu Dhabi. But if you look closely, there were more races in 2010. And in some of them Alonso could have done better. Just in one race a little bit better, and he'd won the championship. But few people want to look at it that way, especially not his fans.
And how many times have we heard from him in some way this year that the car is bad, but he's so good? The car isn't as bad as Alonso makes it look like. With Massa doing better, WCC would be still a realistic possibility for Ferrari, and even not, 2nd or 3rd it will be. There are many people that work very hard to give him a car that enables him to even stay within striking distance for the WDC. Just being grateful when you win, is not helping the team to move forward. And Alonso is also not helping F1 in general, if he talks down Vettel's achievements of this year. Vettel is as worthy to win the championship as Alonso. He doesn't do any favor to himself with this kind of attitude, even though he arguably is the best ATM. I mean, if we all agree that he's the best, then we just hand him the WDC at Melbourne and be done with it. Nobody want's that however, since they do have to earn their trophies in the races. And to me it's either you get the job done with the equipment you have at your disposal, or you don't. If you don't make it shut up and try harder next time. It's not that anyone forced him at gun point to drive for Ferrari. He has to live with the decisions he made.
b) I can't answer you that question for certain, except for Massa obviously not getting the job done. But I go out on a limb and say that I believe Hamilton and Vettel could do as good a job as he does. Vettel IMO has a better way to work with and for his team, which sometimes is exactly what is required to make the difference between a win and an also ran. There's no way I could prove this however. Same goes for Hamilton, who IMO would overall qualify better than Alonso does, which sometimes also makes the difference between a win or an also ran. This year for example Hamilton might have ended up one or 2 places further up in qualifying than Alonso (remember that qualifying was 10 (LH) :7 (FA) for Hamilton in 2007, with Hamilton being a rookie), which had enabled him to stay out of trouble instead of being taken out by other drivers at the start. In that case, everything else similar, the Ferrari driver would still be ahead of Vettel in points. (Never mind about Alonso leading in the WDC and still moaning about his bad Ferrari, might get you the idea, why I think Alonso is way off with his stance on things)
Ok there's a lot of if's that we simply don't know how things had worked out.
And it works both ways, Ferrari agreed to have Alonso, which bugs me even more. For me Ferrari winning with Massa, would mean so much more and it'd be much better for Ferrari. Not that I think it will happen anytime, but one can always dream..
Edited by HP, 18 November 2012 - 12:31.