Mclaren persuade Alonso to stay by ditching engines

Fernando Alonso is expected to re-sign at Mclaren after the team finally decided last night to ditch their bedevilled Honda engines in a switch to Renault.

The Spaniard has made clear throughout his contract renegotiations that his stay at Mclaren would be conditional on a change of engine supplier. The tie-up with Honda, supposed to last 10 years, has been an unmitigated failure, with a plethora of reliability problems leaving the team ninth out of 10 in the constructors’ standings.

Mclaren and Formula One had been loath to let Alonso turn his back on the sport, and the double world champion has duly been offered a minimum two-year contract extension worth at least £20million a year, in line with present terms.

A complex jigsaw has had to fall into place to allow Alonso’s second Mclaren spell to continue. First Carlos Sainz Jnr, the gifted 23-yearold, is jumping ship from Toro Rosso to the Renault works team for next month’s race in Malaysia, with his former team agreeing to join forces with the jilted Honda.

Alonso has been vocal about Honda’s deficiencies this season. At Spa he said the lack of power was “embarrassing”, and in Italy he was engaged in a war of words with his engineers throughout the race.