Jul.26 (GMM) Fernando Alonso was a hero of qualifying in Hungary, although he admitted formula one is “not as exciting” to him anymore.
McLaren-Honda’s nightmare 2015 continued on Saturday when Alonso broke down, but the Spaniard thrilled the crowd by pushing his broken machine back to the pits.
But he was then told the rules, denounced by Alonso as “strange”, prevented him from re-entering the fray.
“I love motor sport, all the categories, and F1 is not as exciting as it was in the past — at least to me,” he admitted.
Alonso, a two-time world champion now stranded amid McLaren-Honda’s struggle, admitted his eyes are starting to wander outside the paddock gates.
“With no testing, with these tyres, with these limitations, with the calendar for example of next year, there is the temptation for (doing) other categories, that is true,” he confessed.
Another former champion disenchanted with modern F1 is Kimi Raikkonen, who thinks the sport should be significantly faster.
“I think if you look at Monaco and we were a few seconds faster than GP2 only, it doesn’t make sense,” he told Finland’s Turun Sanomat.
“F1 teams spend 200 or 300 million while it is a couple of million in GP2. I think we should probably be 15 seconds faster than them.”
Raikkonen had recently been quoted as saying F1 should be more ‘dangerous’, which might be a controversial claim now in light of Jules Bianchi’s tragic death.
“No one wants anything to happen to someone,” the Finn insists, “but it is also part of the sport. It is part of the attraction.
“If you don’t want to do it, you could certainly find a big group of drivers who do like to take risks,” Raikkonen added.