Formula 1 drivers have too little respect for one another, says Alonso. Do you agree? What effect does a lack of respect have on the racing, or on the development of sporting regulations and driver protocol? Where is the line drawn between aggression and lack of respect? Did drivers ever really respect one another?
Look at Massa's reaction to Alonso after their wheel banging at Nurburgring in 2007. Bit of close hard racing and Massa lost his cool over it. I imagine Villeneuve and Arnoux probably had a beer and a laugh over their duel. I'd say it's not so much a lack of respect, it's also the drivers are clad in cotton wool by their teams and are a bunch of primadona's whenever something happens.
I think if there were to be a discussion on respect, it should have propped up regularly in 2011, because of the lack of respect between Lewis Hamilton and Felipe Massa during and after races. Damaging £'s worth of equipment on cars in many races and making fools of themselves on national television afterwards. But this is personal respect, that was strained/stretched back to 2008. Racing respect and the fine line between right and wrong is set about by the FIA guidelines, you can push to and a little over these guidelines which in turn increases viewer entertainment, which is what Nico did, but he did not cause damage or endanger another drivers life really. Although I think it would have been a different story if there was gravel on the right of the track instead of tarmacked run-off. Nico has no lack of personal respect towards both drivers, infact Lewis is Nico's best karting buddy. As soon as a driver is left alone, cocooned inside his shell, things change. This is their job, but to us it is mere entertainment, and I think as a viewing population we make a too much out of nothing when there are a couple of collisions.
In my opinion it started with Senna's complete lack of driving etiquette and on-track respect towards other drivers, and the fact that everyone seems to idolise him these days. There used to be kind of gentlemen's agreements for what was and wasn't acceptable, Senna ignored all these and modern drivers justify doing the same by trotting out the "if you no longer go for a gap" quote. This means the FIA now have to try and nail down a set of rules to weed out unsporting driving. I agree with Alonso, who's always been fair yet aggressive when he's raced.
I think a lot of the respect the drivers in the previous era had was a respect for their own lives. If they'd have tried the sort of shenanigans we've seen from certain drivers of more recent history they would have probably died themselves.
