Alonso: McLaren are not winners

Eurosport - Sat, 12 Apr 19:05:00 2008

Fernando Alonso has claimed that he did not leave McLaren-Mercedes at the end of the 2007 campaign because of his public fall-outs with both team-mate Lewis Hamilton and team principal Ron Dennis, but rather because he deemed the highly successful British outfit to be 'not a winning team'.

The Spaniard cut short his three-year McLaren contract to return to Renault - with whom he claimed both his world drivers' championship successes in 2005 and 2006 - and even if his current R28 mount has proven to be a distinct disappointment in terms of its pace and potential, he argued he believed there was more chance of winning with the Régie in the years to come than had he stayed at Woking.

"McLaren seem like a winning team, but they are not," he is quoted as having said by Dutch website f1today.nl. "Some teams are able to produce good cars [and] seem like winners, but in fact they are not, like McLaren.

"They haven't won any titles in years, so I would rather be with Renault, who in the same period collected two drivers' and two constructors' championships."

Whilst there have been a good many rumours linking the 26-year-old to a switch across to Ferrari in 2009, Alonso also stressed that Renault was the right place to be for him at the moment - though he would only remain there beyond the end of the current season, he added, should he be given a winning car next year.

"I could have gone to a couple of other teams," he acknowledged, "but ultimately Renault seemed like the right ones, with the experience, to make a good car and win races.

"Next year I want to be with a team that can win. At the moment I think it will be Renault, because by the end of the season we will have made up a lot of our deficiencies and then we can make a small further step for next season."