Fernando Alonso has been stripped of his pole position for today’s race after race stewards found him guilty of intentionally impeding Lewis Hamilton in the pits denying the Briton the chance to challenge Alonso’s pole time. The Spaniard has been demoted five places on the grid and will start from 6th promoting Nick Heidfeld, Kimi Raikkonen, Nico Rosberg and Ralf Schumacher up one spot on the grid. Hamilton now starts from his rightful position of pole for the race which starts in 40 minutes time. Giancarlo Fisichella was also demoted five places for blocking Sakon Yamamoto in Q1 and will start from 13th promoting David Coulthard into the top 10. I was reading the ITV-F1 forums yesterday and was shocked to here people praising Alonso’s actions and certain people calling the people that was outraged by Alonso’s actions “idiots” – Formula 1 is a sport like any other and rules and regulations are there for a reason and cheating is the worst kind of rule breaking. Now I come to my second point, I can’t believe that McLaren have defended Alonso’s actions shifting the blame onto Hamilton saying that he didn’t let Alonso through earlier in the qualifying session compromising the strategy. Which in itself is against the rules, team orders are outlawed in Formula 1, so McLaren will not score any constructor points from this race, McLaren are now appealing against the decision. Whether it was a McLaren team collective cockup or Alonso’s deliberate actions to deny Hamilton a final stab at pole position, I think the punishment is about right, maybe a little harsh on McLaren not being able to score constructor points. But the TV evidence speaks for itself really, Alonso sitting there having an argument about tyres with his engineer as we later found out, Ron Dennis throwing his headset and marching Alonso’s trainer down the pitlane to Parc Ferme to speak with Alonso. Either way Alonso impeded Hamilton in the pits which is cheating in any ones books, Alonso is lucky to not be demoted to the back of the grid, or even DQ’ed
