Fernando Alonso once gave envelopes containing more than £1000 to McLaren staff in a bid to gain favour with them over team-mate Lewis Hamilton, it has been claimed.
Though their relationship has healed since, the 2007 season saw all-out war between the two drivers. Alonso was the defending double world champion, while his British rival was the young debutant enjoying a debut Formula 1 season for the ages.
The two competitive racers clashed on plenty of occasions. Eventually, they were both pipped to the drivers' title by Kimi Raikkonen, and Alonso left to re-join Renault while Hamilton went on to become champion for the first time the following year.
Marc Priestley used to be a mechanic for McLaren, and worked for the team during that drama-filled 2007 season. In a new interview, he talked about the relationship between the two drivers and made the claim that Alonso once tried to buy the affection of staff.
"One of Fernando's tactics is to try and bring the whole team over to his side of the garage," he told the PitStop podcast. "He tries to wrestle control. There was a moment during 2007, when we had them both, where Fernando turned up at a race.
"I arrived and Fernando's manager, or his trainer, is handing out little brown envelopes stuffed with cash to everybody who wasn't on Lewis' car. So his team, the support team, I was running the t-car team, we all got these little brown envelopes and I remember opening up the envelope – there was like €1500 or something.
"It was so dodgy, first of all you just get an unmarked brown envelope and I'm like 'thanks very much, what's that?' And the trainer wanders off and you're left with this thing and you open it up and it's literally just full of cash. You start looking around and your colleagues have all got them going 'have you opened yours? How much did you get?'
"All of a sudden this starts spreading around the team and the only people that didn't get them were Lewis' crew. In the end the team obviously found out about it and made us donate the whole lot to charity which was fine, but it was a little insight into the two different mindsets.
"Lewis did different things, Lewis played little games with the media. They all did things wrong and things right, none of us are perfect, but they went about their strategy for being the best Formula 1 driver different, both achieved great results in their own different ways but they were very different approaches."
