Fernando Alonso: Lewis Hamilton, Ron Dennis & where it started to go wrong at McLaren in 2007

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Fernando Alonso: the F1 great who couldn't catch a break - part one of five Fernando Alonso retires from Formula 1 this weekend at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix as one of the sport's biggest stars but arguably its greatest enigma. The 37-year-old is a two-time world champion and has won 32 grands prix; a great achievement in absolute terms, but a relatively meagre one for a driver Lewis Hamilton rates as the best he has ever raced against. Greater success evaded Alonso - fundamentally rooted in bad choices, personality conflicts, and plain rotten luck. But what really happened along the way? Alonso's story will be published in a series of episodes this week, based on interviews with the key people directly involved in the various incidents at the time. Some spoke on the record, some on condition of anonymity. This opening part is about the first serious flashpoint in a year in which two of the all-time great F1 drivers went head-to-head in the same team, and how their team boss' desire to control the situation only made it worse. A clash of personalities

In po[CENSORED]r perception, Alonso's relationship with McLaren was broken by events at the 2007 Hungarian Grand Prix, when a dispute over tactics in qualifying led to Alonso blocking Hamilton in the pits, a grid penalty, and a seismic row with team principal Ron Dennis, in which Alonso threatened to blackmail the team. In fact, it was already terminally damaged before that. Ten weeks before that, in fact, in Monaco, where Alonso was so angered by a post-race argument that his relationship with Dennis never recovered. In many ways, Alonso's 2007 season with McLaren has come to define perceptions of his career - the intense fight with Hamilton, the fall-out with Dennis, the 'spy-gate' scandal, in which Alonso was involved in the team eventually being thrown out of the constructors' championship and being fined $100m for possessing nearly 800 pages of Ferrari technical information. But not everything happened in the way most remember it. Alonso's move to McLaren began as he and Dennis were about to go out on the podium in Brazil in 2005. Alonso, then at Renault, had just clinched his first world title, by finishing third behind McLaren drivers Juan Pablo Montoya and Kimi Raikkonen. As they waited for the ceremony, Dennis asked Alonso whether he would like to drive for McLaren one day.