Former Mclaren driver Heikki Kovalainen believes that Fernando Alonso never recovered from being a teammate of Lewis Hamilton.
In 2007, F1 was introduced with a dynamic duo at McLaren. The two-time world champion was paired with the sensational rookie Lewis Hamilton.
However, things didn’t go well with the partnership, and they had a conflict that McLaren found hard to solve. A year later, Alonso walked away from the Woking-based team.
Alonso was replaced by Heikki Kovalainen, who was in no way a suitable replacement. But the Finnish race driver claims that his predecessor after that 2007 never recovered from being a teammate of Hamilton.
“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 wasn’t any other place to go, Renault was kind of on a downward slope, he was just playing catch up after that and that never really recovered.”
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It’s hard to fight against Lewis Hamilton
Kovalainen himself partnered with two years at McLaren. Over that period, he hardly ever managed to outclass Hamilton. After that, the two never got to team with each other. Thus, the Finnish driver sympathisers with Alonso and admits it’s tough to compete with Hamilton in the same car.
“Occasionally, I could match him, but I had to stretch every session to match him over the entire season. You can only do so much stretching, and then you run out of energy, which was the case with me.
“I didn’t have enough margin in my capacity to do the times and the races that he did, so it was not easy. His level of performance is so high that even for super talents like Max [Verstappen] it requires a lot of effort, a lot of focus, a lot of energy.”
“So it’s not going to be easy, not everyone can handle that, it’s as simple as that.”
