Alonso ‘never recovered from being Hamilton’s team-mate’

Ex-F1 racer Heikki Kovalainen feels Fernando Alonso’s career has suffered ever since his time at McLaren with Lewis Hamilton.

Hamilton and Alonso were team-mates at McLaren in 2007, Hamilton’s rookie season in Formula 1, but it proved to be the only season of this partnership.

After a rocky season for the team, involving multiple flashpoints between Alonso and Hamilton who finished level on 109 points, Alonso’s contract was cancelled by mutual consent, at which point he returned to Renault.

In the years which followed, Alonso’s choice of team when moving has at times been questioned, most notably when he left Ferrari to return to McLaren in 2015, with a poor three-season stint following as the Honda power unit failed to impress.

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And Kovalainen wonders if such wrong decisions can all be traced back to that season with Hamilton and the shock factor of the pace which the rookie showed.

“Since [Alonso’s] championship years with Renault he’s always made the wrong move and just sometimes I wonder if the trigger was the surprise of Hamilton’s speed,” Kovalainen told talkSPORT.

“If that is the core issue, then the falling out with [McLaren boss] Ron Dennis and with the team followed and there