In the 2007 season, McLaren changed its entire driver line-up, signing world champion Fernando Alonso, who had just won his second consecutive top-flight title, and giving Lewis Hamilton the chance to make his debut.
From the beginning, the British driver was surprised by his speed and by the fact that he was able to compete face to face with a driver who at that time had put an end to the streak of the most successful driver in history (now together with Hamilton) Michael Schumacher.
With a similar performance and a car that clearly stood out above its rivals, the tension soon exploded in the McLaren garage and two sides were quickly created, one in favor of Alonso and the other that supported Hamilton , dividing the team. with all the negative that this entails in a discipline like Formula 1.
As the tension mounted and the end of the season approached, with both drivers in contention for the title, the atmosphere became untenable and that resulted in forced errors between one lake and another, which ended the championship of 2007 drivers in the hands of Kimi Raikkonen.
Once the season was over, the Asturian driver, who had seen how his relationship with the director of the Woking team, Ron Dennis , had deteriorated to an unimaginable point, made the decision to leave the team and return to Renault, leaving behind what has surely been the most chaotic and problematic season of his sports career.
While it is true that one of the reasons Alonso gave for leaving McLaren was that the team sympathized more with Hamilton from the beginning, one of the British team’s former mechanics, Mark Priestley , said exactly the opposite happened at first.
“Mechanics and engineers vied with each other to get into Fernando’s task force,” Priestley said on the Pitlane Life Lessons podcast. “Nobody wanted to work on Lewis’s car in his first year, because not much was expected of him.
“When you are an engineer or a mechanic, you also want to be part of the team that wins the title. And we all thought that those who work with the current world champion’s car would have a much better chance of achieving it.”
“As soon as we realized that we had built a fast car, we decided that Fernando would be the champion. However, in the end we lost,” said the former McLaren mechanic.
“You have to admit that the team didn’t know how to manage the situation. For the first time in many years, we had two drivers who were very close to each other. And the relationship management within the team just didn’t work as it should. It wasn’t just the relationship between Hamilton and Alonso , but also between the people who worked with their cars”.
“In fact, the team was divided in two and there was a chasm in the middle. I think that’s the reason why we lost the title in 2007. We had everything to win: the best car, the best drivers and the best specialists. But the most important thing of all was missing: for everyone to work towards a common goal,” he concluded.
