Fernando Alonso has spoiled Spanish fans, because it is not normal for a 44-year-old to continue performing at the level he is, to remain competitive, and to be able to get the best out of his car in every race he competes in. Meanwhile, Lewis Hamilton is going through one of his most difficult periods as a driver since joining Ferrari, and he does not seem to be finding the pace he expected.
Alonso vs Hamilton
Hamilton‘s seven world championships undoubtedly catapult him to the top of F1, but the debate over who is the better driver is more alive than ever. The two drivers’ careers are very different. Fernando Alonso won his only two world titles when he started his career with Renault, and since then, a string of bad luck and poor decisions have deprived him of more titles that he certainly deserved.
However, he has been with many teams throughout his career, repeating with some, including Renault three times, and in recent years he has driven all kinds of cars, some of them very poor, it must be said.
But he has always got more out of each one than there was to give, always beating his teammate (except for his last year at Alpine, when he suffered nine retirements). Because he is a born winner, because he prepares like no one else, because he lives for racing, and, despite his age, that hunger has never gone away.
Hamilton’s career has been very different. To begin with, he made the right choice and bet on Mercedes without anyone being able to imagine the overwhelming dominance it would have. There he won his last six world championships—he had previously won with McLaren—in a car that was far superior to the rest, which ran like a dream. Many believe that he would never have got so far without that technological superiority, but even with that car, he lost a world championship to his teammate, Nico Rosberg, something that many believe Fernando Alonso would not have allowed.
But now Hamilton has ventured into a new challenge, at the age of 40, by trying to become world champion with Ferrari. But it is a change he has never experienced in his career, because he is moving from a British structure, where they work in a particular way, to an Italian team, with totally different people, with automatisms that have nothing to do with what he has experienced, and with a car that has nothing to do with what he has driven. And he is not adapting.
Just as Fernando Alonso’s experience allows him to adapt to any machine with four wheels with ease, and his competitive nature helps him do so, for the Englishman it is a completely new world that he is not able to understand.
Age weighs heavily
And as we said at the beginning, Alonso has spoiled us, because it’s not normal for a 44-year-old to be able to deliver the performance and ambition he is showing. If he has a chance to win, he will go for it, but if he has a chance to finish fifteenth while running sixteenth, he will also fight for it. But being in this world beyond the age of 40 is not easy, and Hamilton is beginning to feel the symptoms of age. We will never know, but perhaps if Fernando Alonso had retired a year ago, Hamilton might have decided to end his career when he decided to leave Mercedes, but he preferred to take on a new challenge, and perhaps he was not ready for it, as the track is dictating.