Mark Hughes: F1's Inside Line

Let's play a game of just suppose. Suppose for a moment Fernando Alonso has it in his mind to retire if he wins this year's world championship.

He has long said he intends to get out early, that he has no intention of staying in the game anything like as long as Michael Schumacher did.

He is still not entirely relaxed within the McLaren environment, and confirms as much each time he is asked. Fernando was already world champion when he signed with the team and a double champ by the time he arrived there.

He didn't know the identity of his team-mate when he signed - and he probably didn't much care. It was already widely believed that Kimi Raikkonen was on the way to Ferrari - so there was the biggest threat out of the way. He must surely have reckoned he could handle anyone else that was put in there.

He'd seen enough GP2, followed enough karting after he himself had left, to know that Lewis Hamilton was extremely good. But a rookie against a double champ? Surely no problem.

Fernando would lead the team, would be its prime focus. At Renault he'd watched in envy at how Ferrari focused all their attention on Schumacher and used the other driver as support to Michael's title aspirations. Usually Fernando was quicker than Renault team-mate Giancarlo Fisichella so the question of team priority looked after itself.

But it wasn't an intrinsic part of the team - at least he didn't feel it was. At Ferrari it had seemed the policy was 'Michael is number one' whereas at Renault it was more 'the quicker guy on the day is number one'. He felt he'd done enough to have similar automatic team status to Schumacher and was irritated he didn't have it.

This little niggle reared its head at Indianapolis last year when Fisi was quicker and finished third to Alonso's fifth.

Fernando was fuming and on the slow-down lap let rip over the radio. He became more public in his criticism after the Chinese Grand Prix when, struggling with worn tyres, he was passed by Fisi.

A week later in Japan he told the world that sometimes in this team 'he felt alone' and that Schumacher would never have found himself in such a situation at Ferrari. By then he was in the mood for speaking his mind, his ridiculous Monza penalty for supposedly impeding Felipe Massa's lap there, leading him to express some pretty frank views.

He's never lost this taste for straight speaking. He's an immensely proud man, justifiably so, and his achievements have brought him the self-security not to feel the need to present a front. He tells it like he sees it and doesn't duck from a straight question.

Joining McLaren was appealing on several levels. For one, he noted how they always developed the performance of their car over a season at a faster rate than anyone else and he'd been a little disappointed by that aspect of Renault. For another, it gave him the chance to win a title with a different team - thereby proving beyond any doubt his true status and worth. But perhaps the clincher was that he felt sure he'd be the number one here and would be treated as such always.

Hamilton's winter testing performances made it pretty clear that he was going to be a threat, particularly as Fernando, like all the former Michelin drivers, was initially struggling to adapt his driving style to the new control Bridgestones. But even that shouldn't have been too much of a worry - he was still number one, surely.

He was even happy enough to let Hamilton take all the headlines for his fantastic opening form in Australia and Malaysia. On both occasions Fernando finished ahead, winning brilliantly in the latter race, with Hamilton playing support and keeping the Ferraris off Alonso's back. It got a bit tiresome in Bahrain when Hamilton had been second and Alonso a disgruntled fifth and everyone kept asking him what he thought about Lewis' brilliant performance. But that was just an irritation.

What he needed was to mould the team more around himself. He didn't like how inflexible it was in its approach to strategy and tyre choices - didn't like how it insisted on making those choices for him rather than informing him of his options and allowing him to decide. It had been a similar story with his brakes in Bahrain.

He didn't like the feel of the hard compound brakes that the team said were necessary to keep wear in check. He wanted a softer material for better feel.

No, the team said, their numbers told them they would not last the distance. Fernando felt he could drive in such a way to keep them alive - he'd specialised in doing exactly that sort of thing at Renault. He'd just come off the power a fraction earlier, let the engine braking do the first tenth of a second of deceleration.

He'd make them last and still go quickly. No, they said. Too marginal. This was not the sort of environment he'd been envisaging.

He let slip a few words about his dissatisfaction and they were duly reported. This was not only his characteristic straight talking but was also tactical. The team would now be extra sensitive about keeping him happy, and his demands would carry more weight. He duly made himself the centre of the test for the Spanish GP, a test to which Hamilton was not invited.

So when Hamilton was immediately quicker come Friday practice, Alonso's face was like thunder as he alighted from the car. He shouldn't be having to fight his own team-mate as well as the Ferraris, he believed. It ended up compromising his race too, so determined was he to put a Ferrari between him and Hamilton at the start that he went off at the first corner.

If he'd been a team-defined number one that wouldn't have been necessary. Besides, he felt that it was only his own signing that had made it less of a risk for McLaren to put a rookie in the other seat. Where was the payback? Where was the respect?

But it was Monaco that really sealed his disaffection. He felt he'd done a great job there, had dug deep to fight off the Hamilton threat to score a superb victory. He was irritated when Lewis intimated he'd been denied a tilt at the win, called off.

He was even more irritated when the team didn't publicly quash that and close to humiliated when the FIA investigated his hard-fought win as a possible breach of the ban on team orders. There are those close to him who insist he now feels more dissatisfied than ever he did at Renault - and that it is not necessarily so that he will still be at McLaren next year.

But where else could he go? Surely not Ferrari. There's no space there and no reason to change their line-up. Besides, it would mean going up against Raikkonen as a guy new to the team. On current form nowhere else would make sense. Besides, his McLaren deal is a multi-year one.

But there is an alternative. He could retire. His pride is surely such that he could only countenance that if he won the title. What a satisfying sign off that would be for someone of his disposition and circumstance.