Alonso and Ferrari: What went wrong?

The story of Fernando Alonso and Ferrari started and ended in the Middle East. But, having marked his arrival with a bang with victory on his debut in Bahrain 2010, the Spaniard departed following a damp squib of a ninth place in last November's Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, following a final stint in which he barely seemed to be trying - a fact betrayed by very uncharacteristic steering traces.

It was a sad way for Alonso to bid farewell to Maranello, ending a five-season innings of increasing frustration.

Alonso's time at Ferrari was neither a success nor a failure. The Spaniard generally delivered superb performances in his near-century of race starts for the Scuderia. He won his first race, was twice in the hunt for the world championship at the final race of the season and, in 2012, produced one of the most consistently remarkable seasons in the history of grand prix racing.

But that win in Bahrain should have been the start of something big. Even without a world championship, Alonso could have walked away a folk hero - Jean Alesi proves that results aren't the only criterion for a place in the tifosi's hearts - but the relationship between team and driver had deteriorated over the years to the point where both were pleased to see the back of each other.

Alonso bid farewell to Ferrari with a poor season © LAT

Alonso took only 11 grand prix victories for Ferrari. Granted, just three drivers in history have won more for the team, but when the names of the Ferrari greatest are listed he will never be held in the same regard as Alberto Ascari, Niki Lauda or Michael Schumacher - drivers who led Maranello to success untold.

A driver cannot make a decent car into a great one. There can be the odd exceptional performance, but Alonso was unfortunate in that he experienced probably his best Ferrari during his first season. In 2010, he won five races and came on strong in the closing stages of the season, only missing out on the title because of flawed strategic thinking.

All the permutations Ferrari had in mind focused on obvious title rival Mark Webber, but nobody worried about outsider Sebastian Vettel. From there, it was all downhill.

Ferrari never mastered exhaust-blown-diffuser technology. In 2011, when huge levels of downforce were being produced before the rules pruned back the effect, Ferrari's sole win came at Silverstone, where the most advanced forms of the system were temporarily banned. It was no coincidence.

The 2012 car was a poor one, particularly early in the season, yet Alonso dragged it to wins in the Malaysian, European and German GPs, taking the title down to the wire. This campaign was the equal of anything Schumacher or Lauda produced in their pomp, reminiscent of the years when Schumacher came close to winning the title in the 1990s against superior machinery from Williams and McLaren.

Since that year, the slide has gathered momentum. There were two early wins in 2013, but since then nothing. Even when all the cards fell for him, Alonso could not win last year's Hungarian GP despite a superb drive. That's how far Ferrari had fallen. With a sub-par power unit arriving to join years of aerodynamic underachievement, the fact is that Maranello was no longer capable of producing the level of car that Red Bull could.

So it seems an open-and-shut case. Transfer Alonso's performances from a Ferrari into a superior car and there would certainly have been a couple of titles during his half-decade in Italy. But while the primary reason for the relationship not working was technical, Alonso is not completely innocent.

Always capable of being a fractious character inside a team, he almost immediately started throwing his weight around in 2010 when he spent much of the second race of the year in Australia stuck behind Felipe Massa, costing him a potential podium.

Subsequent talks at Maranello laid down the number-one/number-two law, leading directly to the controversy in Germany when Felipe Massa, a year to the day since his life-threatening Hungarian GP qualifying accident, was ordered to cede victory to Alonso.

Alonso's final win with Ferrari came in 2013 © LAT

During his final two years at Maranello, there were many indications that Alonso overestimated the strength of his own position. When he publicly flirted with a move elsewhere in the middle of 2013, Luca di Montezemolo publicly admonished him.

Serious consideration was given to dropping him at the end of that season once Kimi Raikkonen had been signed, with at least one very senior figure in favour of doing so. But he was just too good to axe.

From that moment on, separation seemed inevitable. Alonso could easily have hung on for another year, and perhaps he considered doing so once his attempt to engineer a move to Mercedes for 2015 - surely a transfer never seriously on the cards - was thwarted.

But he knew that he had to get out - that too many bridges had been not necessarily burned, but certainly charred and weakened. For all his protests that he is in full control of his destiny, a move back to McLaren for the first year of Honda's comeback was far from his first choice. But it was a necessity.

It was a case of right place, wrong time for Alonso. During times of competitive plenty, the cracks would have been papered over. When team and driver are winning, it's very easy to maintain a healthy relationship. But the bottom line is that Ferrari could not produce a car that was anything more than second, third or fourth best during his tenure at Maranello.

A driver can only do so much. Alonso performed miracles more often than not during his time at Ferrari. But while he might occasionally think he is the second coming, even Alonso wasn't able to turn the water of disappointing cars into the intoxicating wine of title success.