Fernando Alonso has controversially suggested McLaren’s period of success in the 1980’s, early 1990’s was “boring” comparing it Mercedes’ recent run of domination.
The Woking team, for which the Spaniard currently drives, only failed to win the Drivers’ championship once between 1984-1991 with the Ayrton Senna/ Alain Prost partnership in 1988, a year in which McLaren only failed to win once, and 1989 the most famous.
Much like Mercedes since 2014, the races in which a McLaren driver did not stand on the top step of the podium were pretty few and far between in the four seasons covering 1988-1991.
39 times Senna, Prost or later Gerhard Berger collected the winner’s trophy over the 64 races. In comparison, Mercedes have been even more dominant with 49 wins in 59 races since the switch to V6 turbo-hybrids.
“If you see a race now from ’85, ’88 or ’92, you will sleep through the race,” he told Motorsport.com.
“It was two McLaren’s, the fourth guy was lapped and there was 25 seconds between each car. There were 10 cars not finishing because the reliability was so-so.”
However, it isn’t just the single team at the helm that the Spaniard sees as a link between the two periods
“Television figures, spectators are going down [now], like it was in these boring years in the ’80s where Senna, Prost and these people were saving fuel, saving tyres and things like that.”
Indeed, it has been the desire to return to a more ‘flat-out’ style of F1 that Alonso has been craving for the past few years.
The two-time world champion made his name in a time when tyres were merely an afterthought as fuel strategies were the most influential part of deciding races. He was also doing it while driving cars which are still seen as the greatest in F1 history.
For a long time, it seems as if the sport has taken a step back from being the greatest drivers in the most technologically advanced racing cars on the planet. While that improved a bit with the introduction of the new engine formula three years ago, even Alonso feels it didn’t go far enough.
“The resources, the budgets of these teams, the technology we are using allows these cars to be fantastic machines and probably beyond any physics that the human being respects,” he said.
“Now we don’t have that feeling. We have a car that is way too slow with no grip. So we are sitting in a single-seater but with the feeling of a GT.”
The Spaniard is hopeful, as are many in F1, however, that the new rules which have put the focus back on producing the fastest racing cars ever created along with the opening up of engine development can provide the spark that re-ignites his passion for the sport.
“I think this will make that excitement of driving and this joy of driving because we’ll feel the grip and we can push in the corners,” he said.
