Fernando and Ferrari: Charting Alonso's unfulfilled five-year quest for the title

Fernando Alonso’s tempestuous five-season stint at Ferrari has come to an end with a public divorce worthy of a reality TV star played out over 18 months.

Oh, how things have changed from when he joined the team ahead of the 2010 season: “I really think that Ferrari will be my last team. Leaving Ferrari to change team is always a step backwards. Ferrari is more than a team.”

Now aged 33, still with only two world championships to his name and with time running out on his F1 career, Alonso has become convinced that a move away from Ferrari and a return to McLaren will be a step forward. The partnership hasn’t delivered the success both parties expected and if Alonso goes on to win a further world title, it will be the longest gap between championships in F1 history.

So what went wrong at Maranello? We chart Ferrari and Fernando's unfulfilled quest for the title season-by-season...

2010

Just how differently might things have turned out for Fernando and Ferrari had they not let the Drivers’ Championship slip through their fingers at the first attempt? While Alonso may have got mathematically closer to denying Sebastian Vettel and Red Bull two years later, 2010 stands out – and glaringly so – as the one that got away thanks to a bungled strategy call by the team in the Abu Dhabi finale.

It wasn’t that Alonso’s first Ferrari car, the F10, was the equal or better of Red Bull’s RB6 but it was arguably closer on outright pace to Vettel’s all-conquering machine than any of the following three years. That’s a point underlined by the fact that what, quite astonishingly, stand as Alonso’s only two dry-weather pole positions of his Ferrari career came during that first season. Like his ousted predecessor, but future team-mate, Kimi Raikkonen, Alonso won on his debut for the Scuderia, leading home Felipe Massa in an impressive one-two in Bahrain. But the Spaniard then only finished on the podium twice (in Spain and Canada) in the next nine events and uncharacteristically threw points away via costly mistakes in China, where he jumped the start, and then in Monaco thanks to a heavy crash in final practice which kept him out of qualifying. After a British GP ruined by drive-through penalty, Alonso found himself 47 points off the pace in the championship.

However, it was at the very next round, and now infamous 2010 German GP, where the Spaniard’s fortunes started to turn. A first victory since Bahrain may have only been secured after the Ferrari pitwall controversially told long-time race leader Massa to move out of the way for his team-mate, but the effect on Alonso’s faltering title challenge was immediate as he won three of the next seven races – including Monza – to claim the title lead ahead of Red Bull duo Mark Webber and Vettel. Going into the Abu Dhabi finale, Alonso only needed to finish second to be sure of the crown but a lamentable misreading on the pitwall of who their main Red Bull rival was in the evolving race – Vettel was the outsider for the crown but leading the GP – prompted a mistaken strategy call to cover an off-colour Webber’s early stop, which only served to drop Alonso into traffic and stuck behind Vitaly Petrov’s Renault in seventh place. With the DRS overtaking aid still several months away from creation, Alonso found no way past the Russian and the title went to Vettel by four points.

In the noisy aftermath to the title failure, head of race track engine