After Nico Rosberg surprised the Mercedes F1 team by announcing his retirement only a few days after beating Lewis Hamilton to the championship in 2016, the Silver Arrows contacted multiple drivers to replace him for the next season.
Among the list of people was 2-time world champion and Hamilton’s old[McLaren] teammate, Fernando Alonso.
Though, as Marca quoted Alonso in 2017, Mercedes had a type for the driver that they were looking for to take a seat alongside their star, Hamilton.
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The ‘driver type’ that Mercedes wanted next to Lewis Hamilton
The Spaniard said in 2017 that the Silver Arrows had a driver profile on Valtteri Bottas and Pascal Wehrlein type who would be fit for the Mercedes hierarchy and not create too many hindrances in Hamilton’s way.
But Alonso, who was challenged by rookie Hamilton in 2007 at McLaren, would never settle as a second fiddle in a team.
Furthermore, apart from the terms of Mercedes, Alonso already had a contract with his old team[McLaren] and that’s exactly what he told Toto Wolff[Mercedes boss] when he reached out to him.
The Spaniard told Wolff that he was happy with the British team and he wasn’t willing to do anything crazy.
Lewis Hamilton’s triple overtake on Fernando Alonso, Esteban Ocon and Nico Hulkenberg pic.twitter.com/244Q5YjNmg
— LH POLE LAP EVERY DAY UNTIL F1 IS BACK (@LHPOLELAPS) January 8, 2023
Hamilton-Alonso rift is still alive
The fire that was triggered between Hamilton and Alonso in their first year as teammates in 2007 is still alive.
Now, even though the duo race in different teams and do not come across each other a lot on the track, it has not killed the rivalry that the two share.
The most recent example of this came at the 2022 Belgian GP. The problem child of Mercedes in 2022, W13, ended the Silver Arrows’ domination in the sport and pushed the team in the midfield from the top of the grid.
Due to this, the 7-time world champion had many battles with the mid-field team including Alpine, driven by Alonso. In the opening of the race at the Belgian GP, the duo came together and crashed into each other sparking a war of words and sly jibes at each other.
Off the track, Alonso even undermined the Briton’s titles compared to Verstappen. To which, Hamilton just responded by sarcastically tweeting a picture of him and Alonso on the podium when Hamilton had won the race with McLaren.
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