need an alonso scandal primer BAD
Oh Lord, I am tired after work so I will just give a very quick summary:
The Really Big Ones are Spygate 2007, when McLaren were found to have possession of stolen technical information from Ferrari. Fernando had his own mini-scandal within this scandal, when he deliberately held up Lewis during qualifying for the 2007 Hungarian Grand Prix (for which the FIA penalised McLaren and basically told them to get their drivers in line). The next day Fernando attempted to threaten Ron Dennis by sending evidence confirming McLaren knew about the stolen Ferrari information. Which led to Ron Dennis running to the FIA President, Max Mosley, to tell him that he knew nothing about the emails, which led to the FIA re-investigating the whole saga, which led to McLaren getting a $100,000,000 fine, the biggest in sporting history.
Oh, 2007 F1 Season you will always be famous.
Also in the 2007 season, Marc Priestley wrote in his book that Fernando was going around giving his mechanics brown envelopes of cash, which is, how you say, a wee bit scandalous.
Then there was the 2008 Crashgate scandal, when Nelson Piquet Jr deliberatly crashed in order to ensure that Fernando won the race. Who knows if Fernando knew about it at the time, but it's yet another weird scandal he got caught up in.
Then in 2010, there was the Fernando Is Faster Than You incident (yes that video involves Christian Horner being an enormous hypocrite but that aside) in which Ferrari gave a team order for Felipe Massa to move aside for Fernando, even though team orders were illegal at the time. And it was in particularly bad taste given that this was at the Hungarian GP, the race where one year earlier, Felipe had suffered a serious head injury.
In 2012, at the American GP, Ferrari deliberately broke the seal on Felipe Massa's engine in order to give Fernando an advantage on the by moving him to the clean side of the track.
In 2013, Fernando was asked at the Hungarian Grand Prix (what is it with Fernando and Hungary) what he would like for his birthday, and he replied "someone else's car" (valid tbh) and the boss of Ferrari called him on his birthday to yell at him.
Jenson has said that when they were at McLaren, Fernando used to pretend there were problems with the car and retire if Jenson was ahead of him in a race.
And then, when it was announced that Fernando was going to Aston Martin, Otmar said he hadn't spoken to Fernando because he was on a boat with no signal. Literally later that day, Fernando posted a selfie of himself in Barcelona, making it extremely obvious that he was just ignoring Otmar's calls because he wanted to.
I'm absolutely certain there's other things I'm forgetting, but those are the ones that came immediately to mind. As you can tell, not all of it is directly Fernando's fault, but the man's just a magnet for scandal and drama. It says a lot that I said this was going to be a quick primer, and I spent the best part of an hour writing and researching eight paragraphs worth of stuff.
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
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