DanielPT wrote:Not to mention that this "he is not interested" stuff implies that he is completely unprofessional. Can an unprofessional driver thrive in F1? I don't think so. For instance, Juan Montoya became disinterested and was given the boot at McLaren with Kimi also driving there at the time. And Montoya used to match a younger and hungrier Raikkonen most of the time. Yes, Kimi could have lost his flame when he finally was WC. But in this case what was that 2 years ago at Lotus and early last year at Lotus? Sure, at the end of the year he wasn't being paid, but by then Grosjean had improved and started to match and beat Raikkonen too. Sure, as a driver gets older it is normal to lose some edge but Alonso isn't a young driver anymore and he seems to have no trouble in smashing Raikkonen to pieces. Dispite all this, I still can understand why Kimi fans prefer to go with "he is not interested" instead of recognising that their man is not what he once was.
Part of it is probably a consequence of the fact that he has admitted in the past that he has had trouble in maintaining his motivation when he is struggling, which I guess makes people wonder if his current malaise is self inflicted.
For example, after the 2008 season he informed Turun Sanomat that, when he started to struggle to set the car up to his liking, he lost interest in fighting for the title and effectively gave up on that season. Now, it's worth bearing in mind that he spent much of that season driving a car that many considered to be at least as good as the MP4/23 and probably slightly better (particularly on braking, where McLaren were forced to revert to an older brake set up as part of the penalties imposed after "Spygate") and spent at least half of the season close to or at the front of the WDC (at the halfway point, he was equal with Massa and Hamilton on points).
The fact that, when things became harder, he eventually lost heart when he had the chance of becoming a double world champion perhaps makes people wonder if, when he is fighting for lesser glories, his motivation might drop even more rapidly. Furthermore, Kimi has indicated that he is giving consideration to retiring for good in the next few years; again, given that quite a few drivers in the past have shown signs of losing interest if they've established a retirement deadline and are seemingly going through the motions, I suppose some might suspect Kimi of the same behaviour.
Now, whether there is any truth in that is another matter - only Kimi can really answer that point, and at the moment he is giving away nothing. At the very least, it seems that a fair number of his issues seem to stem from the fact that he is very sensitive to the handling of a car, and sometimes almost a bit too sensitive - with the F2008, he could never quite get the front end of the car to turn in quite as he wanted it to, whilst at Lotus there were times when he also had issues with the steering that saw his form slump dramatically.
Just look to his performance in the 2012 Monaco GP, a circuit where Lotus were expected to be quite competitive - instead, Kimi spent much of the weekend off the pace after complaining that he disliked the Monaco steering rack the team had developed specifically for him. After refusing to do any laps in FP1 until the car was changed, the loss of practise time meant that the car was simply not set up properly and therefore cost him dearly in the race, where he suffered from higher than anticipated tyre wear. With the F14T reportedly not being the easiest car to drive, since it appears that the energy recovery under braking is not as smooth as on the Mercedes powered cars, it seems that those set up issues are hitting Kimi harder than ever this time around - that, I suspect, is the biggest issue that he has to deal with.
(Tony Jardine, 1988)
