The press are saying that Liberty will help pay Alonso's salary if he goes to Renault..... how could they justify helping one driver and one team?? They also report that Vettel leaving Ferrari has cost F1 stock over $90million so why wouldn't Liberty help keep Vettel in F1 by pushing him towards Renault. It is either rubbish or very confusing!
Legally, they can't - it's advertised as a sport, which means the leadership cannot help one team over another. (Perceptions of helping one team over another are different, but at minimum, plausible deniability must exist!)
More likely, some big sponsors are keen to help pay the salary and Liberty's happy to help with introducing them to Renault. (As long as it does that every time it catches wind of a big sponsor wanting to help a team, that is within its powers - at least in theory).
As for the other dominoes: I have a bad feeling about Renault. Whoever takes Daniel's place is going to be in trouble. Daniel will likely find McLaren more freeing than he expects, and thus will perform better than at Renault. He's going to give Lando a lot to think about, though I also think Lando can give as good as he gets. Plus that's going to be a hilarious, fan-friendly team off-track... Not words I could have imagined typing about McLaren in either Ron Dennis era. (In point of fact, that very lightness is likely to help McLaren be a bit quicker).
Sainz to Ferrari seems... ...a little odd. Now, I can understand Ferrari wanting a natural #2 without needing to specify that in any contract, but they've only hinted at that, and I don't think Carlos is getting the hint. He has enough speed to covet the #1 role but not the supporting skills to make it happen. Carlos may well enter Ferrari and have a performance or two that looks like it can subvert Ferrari's intended position - in fact that's very likely - but I think that will be the ruining of his job position.
This is because Carlos has not, to my eye, shown an ability to separate what he is actually doing from what others say he is doing. Ferrari has a bad habit of saying drivers are doing multiple things, depending on who one listens to and how the listening is done, so drivers who are taking their cues from their team (and most of them do, at least to some extent) are apt to be confused - especially given that the nature of things is that great races are followed by mediocre ones. That's before we start with what press, fans, advisors and what one's own instinct (the latter not always of a unified opinion in all circumstances) says are happening. With that confusion, there's no way back from the mediocre races to the great ones, except by luck. That could induce consistency, potentially - but it would be consistent mediocrity, which is not what Carlos seeks.
Now, Carlos can lead a bit, but is hopeless at psuedopolitics and quite intense in approach. This is an awkward combination, because the approaches to lasting at Ferrari seem to be:
- Lead and be good at psuedopolitics at which point one can be as intense as one likes). Example: Michael Schumacher
- Lead and not be particularly intense (at which point the psuedopolitical side is almost irrelevant) Example: Kimi Raikkonen
- Be good at psuedopolitics and not be too intense (at which point, one can slot in as a leader or follower as appropriate under the circumstances) Example: Felipe Massa
This means Carlos risks being sidelined when he discovers the gap between his dreams and his power, because he'll be accidentally bringing down the team mood and not saying/doing the right things. I don't mean losing his contract - in fact, as he's more consistent about his intensity and psuedopolitical skills than Alonso, he might even be offered a (not particularly great) contract extension at the end of his first stint. Rather, like what eventually happened to Felipe when Ferrari started doing strange things to keep Fernando Alonso on board, he'll find he loses some sense of the team's enthusiasm and find the relationship unravelling in his hands.
This will do Carlos no harm in his midfield team negotiations and might even help his career in the long run. It just won't be what Carlos has in mind at this point.
* Sidenote: Ferrari is less picky about type of leadership, I think, than some other teams - but to take approaches 1) or 2), it's necessary to be leading Ferrari in at least some things it needs. Kimi definitely didn't lead at everything, but he concentrated on the types of leadership Ferrari needed in 2007 and from there, focused on consistency. This is part of why his puesdopolitical skills didn't matter - Ferrari knew and trusted that Kimi would never backstab anyone, and what they saw was what they got, and that he didn't need to wait for an instruction to do something useful. This led to a useful co-leadership with Vettel during his second stint at Ferrari, and their joint contribution to getting Ferrari back into title contention is often overlooked.