Alonso: Abu Dhabi repays Stella for our 2010 F1 title miss

fernando alonso says McLaren’s Formula 1 title in Abu Dhabi has repaid team boss Andrea Stella for Ferrari’s title defeat in 2010.

Stella was alonso’s race engineer ferrari When the Spaniard went into the 2010 season finale with an eight-point lead over Red Bull mark webber And Webber has a 15-point lead over his teammate sebastian vettel,

Vettel led the race from pole, while Alonso’s early pitstop in response to Webber sent the two-time world champion into traffic. Famously, Alonso was unable to pass the Renault. Vitaly Petrov One of two cars that needed to be recovered to limit the damage to eventual race winner Vettel.

Alonso and Stella will have another outside shot at the World Championship with Ferrari in 2012 unless they both join mclaren During a lean, transitional period for 2015.

Speaking after McLaren finally managed to win the World Championship for the first time in 26 years, Alonso said he was happy for his former race engineer and commented that the 2024 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix would be the last of his and Stella’s painful defeat in 2010. Was the revenge of.

“Yeah, fantastic,” said Alonso. “I’m good friends with Jack (Brown, McLaren CEO) and a very good friend of Andrea.

In a way, I brought him to McLaren when I joined McLaren, so I said to him before the race: ‘What Abu Dhabi took out of our hands in 2010, hopefully today it will give something back to you.

“And it happened, so I’m happy for him. He deserves it, he’s a very smart person and McLaren is an example for many teams now.

Zak is a really good friend of mine, we’re going to spend a few days together over the next few weeks and have some fun at track days.

McLaren’s spectacular turnaround over the past 18 months, from avoiding double Q1 elimination to winning the championship in early 2023 Mercedes The customer team in 2024 is serving as an example for the rest of the grid. This is especially true for Mercedes’ fellow customer Aston Martin, another team in transition as it strengthens its engineering ranks at a brand new Silverstone headquarters.

Aston had to go back to the drawing board after failing to add significant performance to its cars since the flying start of the 2023 season, which saw Alonso achieve six podiums in the first eight races and a near victory in Monaco.

This year Aston finished alone fifth in the championship, but scored only 94 points compared to 280 the previous season.

“The biggest change was last year,” said Alonso. “McLaren didn’t do much in 2019, 2020, 2021 or 2022. They didn’t do much until Austria in 2023 where they were on the podium.

“In Austria they introduced a package which gave them six or seven tenths, and that was the beginning of a series of packages which eventually made their car the fastest.

“If we want to call this an Austria package, this is something we need to work on.”

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