tactic
Fernando Alonso once gave mechanics ‘envelopes stuffed with cash’ to take control from Lewis Hamilton in ‘dodgy’ move when the pair were McLaren teammates
Fernando Alonso once handed out envelopes of money to McLaren staff in an attempt to gain favour over teammate Lewis Hamilton.
That’s according to the team’s former mechanic turned media personality Marc Priestley who made the claim about his tactics during their disastrous one-year partnership.
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Alonso was coming off back-to-back world titles with Renault when he joined McLaren in 2007, and was partnered by a young British rookie who looked certain to be the team’s no.2 driver.
However, that Brit was reigning GP2 champion Hamilton, who didn’t take long to match the more experienced Spaniard.
The pair recorded four wins each and were inseparable as they both took 109 points in the world championship, just a single point behind eventual winner Kimi Raikkonen.
Their time together only endured a single season before Alonso returned to Renault, with a number of infamous flash points, including Alonso holding his teammate up in the pits to ruin his qualifying at the Hungarian Grand Prix.
But that was far from the end of his attempts to get a one up on the now seven-time world champion as his former mechanic, Priestley revealed.
“One of Fernando’s tactics is to try and bring the whole team over to his side of the garage,†. “He tries to wrestle control.
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“There was a moment during 2007 when we had them both where Fernando turned up at a race and I arrived and Fernando’s manager or his trainer is handing out little brown envelopes stuffed with cash to everybody who wasn’t on Lewis’ car.
“So his team, the support team, I was running the t-car team, we all got these little brown envelopes and I remember opening up the envelope and there was like €1500 or something.
“It was so dodgy, first of all you just get an unmarked brown envelope and I’m like ‘thanks very much what’s that’ and the trainer wanders off and you’re left with this thing and you open it up and it’s literally just full of cash.
“You start looking around and your colleagues have all got them going ‘have you opened yours? How much did you get?’ and all of a sudden this starts spreading around the team and the only people that didn’t get them were Lewis’ crew.
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“All of a sudden it starts to dawn on us what’s happened here, he’s looking to gain support, he’s trying to encourage, let’s say, people to support his side of this intense battle that they were in.
“On one hand you can say it was a clever tactic but in the end the team obviously found out about it and made us donate the whole lot to charity which was fine, but it was a little insight into the two different mindsets.
“Lewis did different things, Lewis played little games with the media, they all did things wrong and things right, none of us are perfect, but they went about their strategy for being the best Formula 1 driver was different, both achieved great results in their own different ways but they were very different approaches.â€
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