Where does Alonso go from here?

04 September 2015 - 02:08 By Julia Beffon

With the announcement yesterday that both Valtteri Bottas and Felipe Massa remain at Williams next year, the options for Fernando Alonso are diminishing rapidly. The penalties handed to the Spaniard and his British teammate, Jenson Button, for engine replacements at this weekend's Italian Grand Prix at Monza highlight Alonso's problems.Being demoted to the back of the grid is not a championship-wrecking blow for the McLaren team of 2015; it just means starting a couple of spots behind where they have started pretty much all season.While other teams such as Ferrari and Red Bull have shown they are slowly but steadily closing the gap on Mercedes, which has yawned since the rule changes introduced for the 2014 season, McLaren have got worse - significantly worse.That a team that once dominated the sport now regularly fails to get out of the first round of qualifying is a measure of how far and how fast McLaren has fallen. Add the fact that both Alonso and Button are former world champions and it is obvious the car is a turkey.The question about Alonso is: Why is he such a great decision-maker on the track, but not off?His first major career change came when he left Renault for a first spin with McLaren in 2007.Ego clashes with the abrasive Lewis Hamilton limited that stint to a single season. But it was a good car, which makes it inexplicable that Alonso had left to return to the fading Renault outfit.He moved to Ferrari in 2010, only to finish runner-up to Sebastian Vettel at Red Bull. When it became known Vettel was moving to Ferrari, Alonso, and his ego, returned to McLaren...

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