There’s some guy – apparently he’s some kind of DJ – who can usually be seen celebrating in the pits with the team whose driver wins the WCC. Nobody seems to know who he is, but he’s always dressed up in team colours and seems to be front and centre for the celebrations. He’s barrel-chested and overweight (but not the guy JT19 is talking about). He was in the Ferrari garage in 2007, McLaren in 2008 and Red Bull in 2010. No-one knows where he was in 2009, or why he wasn’t in the Brawn garage. But he’s the ultimate bandwagoner: he acts like he’s a major part of the team, but he’s always in with the championship winners.
Bernie is probably the person most people hate, though I often get the feeling that people disagree with him simply because he’s the one who said something. If someone like Whitmarsh had come up with the idea of medals, it wouldn’t have been nearly as derided. Shot down, certainly, but not so blithely discredited.
The most-hated person on the grid is probably Fernando Alonso. Ignoring the stouch with Hamilton in 2007 and the fuel both the Spanish and British press threw on that fire, Alonso seems to have a very closed personality. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but the way it manifests itself makes him seem arrogant. Like when he said he wasn’t worried about Vitaly Petrov because he didn’t consider Petrov to be a title contender. Well sure, the Russian isn’t a contender, Fred, but as long as he keeps finishing in front of you, he’s going to be a problem that you have to deal with. Elsewhere, he just seems over-rated, and his fans are particularly militant. everyone points to Germany 2010 as being a case where Alonso was clearly faster than Massa, and so asking for Massa to be moved over was entirely justified – but it Alonso was nearly as good as people were making out, then he was so much faster that he wouldn’t have needed Massa to mvoe over because he would have driven clean around the Brazilian. Before Alonso, Nelson Piquet Jnr. was the most-hated man in the sport.
Dany Bahar also gets a bad rap, largely because people seem to think he’s trying to hijack the Lotus name from Fernandes. The only reason why Fernandes gets any support is becuse he was in the sport for a year. But if you really look at what is going on, there’s a lot to support Dany Bahar. Nevertheless, people still think he should give over and let Fernandes use the Lotus name because it would be “free publicity” (but given the situation, it’s about the same as Barack Obama asking Muammar Qaddafi to appear as the face of America’s new tourist campaign). Some of the comments from Fernandes and Gascoyne in particular – namely the stuff about aiming to “embarrass” other teams – have not endeared the team to anyone, while others (like “the good always win eventually”) just speak to a loosening grip on reality.
