Renault: Hamilton will give Alonso doubts

In an interview in Renault's official podcast, Nielsen said that pressure from teammates had affected Alonso during his four seasons with the team.

"In his career, he has always been comfortably faster than teammates, and now he's got a guy who's his equal, if not maybe a little bit quicker in the races as we've seen so far," said Nielsen.

"And I think he'll be questioning himself, deep down inside, as to whether he is really quicker than his teammate, and I think that will give him a lot of self-doubt.

"The few times we saw Fernando really under pressure were when his teammate beat him. That's the situation he's in now."

Executive director of engineering Pat Symonds said he had been surprised to see Hamilton beating Alonso in Bahrain and Spain.

"It would be a brave man, but probably not a very honest man, who said he could have foreseen Lewis giving Fernando a hard time," Symonds said.

"Certainly I couldn't, and it's been a big surprise.

"We all thought he must be pretty good. We'd seen him in GP2 and we knew Ron (Dennis) had a lot of faith in him. The guy had to be something a bit special.

"Here at Renault, we know exactly what Fernando's like. We know what Lewis is up against, and for him to go against him and be the equal of him, at least, is to me absolutely amazing."