Something that for some reason has been all over the motorsport news recently over the pre-season testing in Valencia, which if I’m honest I don’t really understand.
A group of Spanish people make jokes about Lewis Hamilton, I fail to see how that’s not understandable. It’s pretty clear that apart from what their PR managers make them say that they probably don’t like each other (otherwise I’d imagine Alonso would still be driving for McLaren) and that there will be repercussions on Alonso’s home turf.
Being half-cast I’m familiar with racism and I hate it with a passion, and it’s one of those things that causes the “bull-in-a-china-shop” feeling, but I agree with Bernie Ecclestone that it’s probably nothing to worry about. Why? Because we’ve had drivers from all over the world and nothing like this has happened in a major scale before, and generally people are a lot more tolerant towards other races now than say 20-30 years ago. We’ve had oriental and asian drivers that haven’t had any problems, and european drivers are the norm, so I don’t expect that the anger towards Lewis from certain Spanish fans is because he’s black. It’s because they hate how he made Alonso look, and we’ll see what happens next season and whether Renault have any answers to that…