Lewis Hamilton should watch his back

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Lewis Hamilton might feel relieved that the Spanish driver who doesn’t like him won’t be driving for McLaren in 2008.

At least, one of them won’t.

Here’s an exchange between Pedro de la Rosa and Fernando Alonso that didn’t come out in the World Motor Sports Council’s espionage hearings.

Talking about a new flexible rear wing, de la Rosa jokes that Hamilton should have to test it, presumably in case it breaks:

Maybe we can get Lewis to try it at the Monza test.

The quote is from Mark Hughes’ “Lewis Hamilton: The Full Story”.

As Hughes puts it: “There may have been a feeling of the two of them against Hamilton.” Quite. It does rather suggest Hamilton was not party to all the emails that went back and forth between his team mates…

More on Hamilton & Alonso

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Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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7 comments on “Lewis Hamilton should watch his back”

  1. Ouch. Well, it is a nice answer to the critics who can’t believe Lewis couldn’t have known anything about the McLaren-Ferrari info. My goodness, how much worse can things get?

    Oh yeah, if Alonso’s out of McLaren, what’s de la Rosa (who is nowhere near as good as FA) still doing at Woking?

  2. I was quite surprised at De la Rosa’s continued involvement since it turned out he knew about the dossier and was discussing elements of it. For this alone I thought it would’ve been dismissable behaviour, certainly from a McLaren ethos point of view.

    Or was this to keep Spanish-related sponsors happy?

    Anyway, in regard to this context, it is only natural that countrymen talk to each other, I mean this could’ve easily been a joke between them which may have meant nothing. Or a lot more. Just speculation I guess.

  3. er..if it didnt appear in the WMSC transcript where was this qute plucked out from? And that quote could have meant anything. im sure during friday and saturday practise, the drivers take turns to test out different parts to see how effective they are.Have seen it in other teams where in one session Driver A had this wing in the morning and Driver B had it in the afternoon.

    De la rosa and Alonso was not the one who held the information. It was Coughland…when an engineer have a new data and tells the drivers..what are they suppose to do??

    Adrian Newey has just said..spying has always been in formula 1 since the beggining only that no one had been caught having documents of another team openly. Formula 1 is a competetive sport where drivers and engineers do whatever they can to win.So i don’t believe Hamilton is not involved.And the act of the Mclaren lawyers during the appeal for the Brazilian Gp results is the true definition of HYPOCRITE. Thank god the WMSC used their brains in that one.

    I qute the great Ayrton Senna, “Winning is Everything” and “Nice men don’t win”

  4. That’s the quote as it appears in the book. I don’t know how Hughes got it but apparently it is from an email from de la Rosa to Alonso, and I haven’t seen it anywhere else or in a fuller form.

  5. and again Keith – was it a translation from Spanish?

  6. Not sure I’m afraid – if I find out I’ll post it here.

  7. ..psssst….Pedro,let’s put a few more pounds of nitro in Lewis’ tires and see what happens.

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