Former F1 rider Fernando Alonso has revealed that his contract ended at the end of 2007 due to rivalry with popular Lewis Hamilton.
Both were teammates in Hamilton’s debut season and there was always confrontation on and off the track.
The Spaniard was banned from joining any team that McLaren considered challengers for the 2008 World Championship but he eventually signed for Renault.
Speaking about the rivalry in his new DAZN documentary, ‘Fernando. Revealed’, Alonso said: “We were in the same team, the same garage, we traveled together many times, we were in the meetings and we began to notice that there was this friction, there was tension, we were playing the World Cup and we were playing each race on Sunday.
“You arrive at the team meeting and you are seeing his telemetry, his ‘on board’ cameras of the car, and that, for example, his car goes a little ahead and when he speaks in the meeting he complains about the rear.
“Things like that so that the team did not take a direction or take a philosophy to develop the car that would be good for both of us, but rather each one was already looking for their own thing, to have that extra advantage, because we were very evenly matched.
“There were many things that broke the relationship harmony of that year. We were young and immature, I was the first, and we had many clashes.
“Now there is another type of rivalry, I don’t think we will be friends in the future or that we will ever have… I think we don’t share many things.
“But it is true that in 2007 the rivalry rose to a higher level.”
Alonso finished fourth in the driver standings last season, with Hamilton in third.
