Alonso’s cool trick in the rain: how a few words rattled Webber in Korea 2010
There’s a hard edge to Fernando Alonso that never needed a steering wheel to do damage. In Yeongam, 2010, he used words.
Torrential rain had turned Formula 1’s first Korean Grand Prix into a long, tense wait. Cars sat on the grid under a red flag after an aquaplaning parade behind the Safety Car. Mark Webber, then leading the championship in the Red Bull, parked up at the front. Alonso, in the Ferrari, rolled in alongside. And he started talking.
“I came to the grid and I spoke with him,” Alonso recalled of that day. “The track is really bad, this aquaplaning. It will be a disaster if we restart the race now.” He already suspected the race was about to go green. The message was the point. Seed doubt, amplify the fear. “He said that, entering his mind, that the track was worse than what actually it was.”
When the race did relaunch, Webber blinked first. On lap 19, he clipped the kerb at Turn 12, snapped into the wall and slid back across into Nico Rosberg’s Mercedes. Two title contenders gone in one go. Alonso stayed ice-calm in the spray.
That was the day his dark arts met a perfect storm. Sebastian Vettel, leading comfortably in the other Red Bull, lost an engine late on. Alonso picked his way through the chaos to win and walk out of South Jeolla Province with a championship lead — 11 points clear of Webber, momentum in his pocket, and the unmistakable feeling that he’d shifted the whole title picture with more than just race pace.
“I was trying to use every single thing that was in my pocket,” he said. And he did. This was peak Alonso: hyper-present, hyper-practical, using the room, the moment, the silence between engines to prosecute a championship fight.
In the end, of course, 2010 belonged to Vettel, who launched his run of four straight titles with a clutch victory in Abu Dhabi. But Korea was Alonso’s masterpiece, a grand prix that fused opportunism with calculation. Think about the ingredients he juggled: a brand-new circuit, rivers running across apexes, a race control room under pressure, tyre temperatures on a knife-edge, and rivals tripping over the math of a five-way title run-in. And amid all that, a short conversation that nudged a rival’s reference points just enough.
Was the track treacherous? Absolutely. Did Alonso overplay it? That was the idea. In a field of drivers conditioned to trust their feel, introducing a little doubt is like moving a braking marker by a metre. Most won’t notice. One might. In title fights, one is enough.
It’s also a reminder of how 2010 felt from inside the helmet. Webber, Alonso, Vettel, Lewis Hamilton, even Jenson Button at times — it was chess at 300 kph. That year gave us the full Alonso spectrum: raw speed, relentless racecraft, and the off-track theatre he’s never been shy to direct. Sometimes he’s the sledgehammer. In Korea, he was the scalpel.
The race itself was as grim as it looked. Three laps behind the Safety Car, red flag, darkness threatening the late finish. When it finally ran, visibility was a suggestion. Webber’s error was the headline moment, but the attrition kept coming. The final twist — Vettel’s Renault engine letting go with the chequered flag not far off — handed Ferrari and Alonso an unlikely swing that kept the championship alive to the very end.
Korea didn’t stick around long. Formula 1 raced there through 2013 before the event quietly slid off the calendar. The venue lives on as a time capsule: gloomy skies, spray plumes, Vettel’s smoke, Alonso’s grin.
Fifteen seasons later, the anecdote lands because it tracks with what we’ve watched ever since. Alonso’s a two-time world champion and still a live wire in any battle — the guy who will race you on entry, on exit, and, if he can, before the lights go out. In 2010 he found a way to turn a red-flag lull into a title lever. He hasn’t changed much. The tactics just keep meeting new targets.
