Top five Renault F1 drivers
3 RENE ARNOUX
Arnoux’s most famous Renault moment is probably the fight with Gilles Villeneuve’s Ferrari at the 1979 French GP, but there was more to the Frenchman’s time at the squad than that. A spectacular qualifier, Arnoux took 14 poles for Renault – more than team-mate Alain Prost – and scored four wins. Didn’t always play the team game – he decided to win the 1982 French GP rather than help title challenger Prost – but was fast.
5 JARNO TRULLI
Giancarlo Fisichella won two races for Renault to Trulli’s one, but neither was as good as Trulli’s 2004 Monaco GP success, and Fisichella can’t be forgiven for losing the 2005 Japanese GP. Trulli, who joined Renault in 2002, fared well against Alonso in the early part of 2004, even though he fell out of favour with the team. At Monaco, Trulli outpaced the Spanish star and held off Jenson Button to take a superb victory.
2 ALAIN PROST
Prost’s time at the squad ended in acrimony as he was made the scapegoat for the failure to win the 1983 crown but, until the arrival of Alonso in the 21st century, Prost was comfortably the driver who got closest to winning a title with Renault. He scored nine wins and 10 poles in his three seasons with the team. A fourth drivers’ crown with Renault-powered Williams in 1993 helped heal the old wounds.
4 JEAN-PIERRE JABOUILLE
The 1976 European Formula 2 champion makes it onto this list partly because he had to go through the pain of developing the turbocharged engines of the late 1970s. He suffered reliability problems that modern F1 drivers would not believe, but his RS10 held together to win the 1979 French GP, the first turbo success in the world championship. He followed it up with a fine victory in the 1980 Austrian GP.
1 FERNANDO ALONSO
It was the Alonso-renault combination that finally ended Michael Schumacher’s domination of F1 with Ferrari. Two title doubles and 15 wins for Alonso were the tallies before his first ill-fated move to Mclaren. The package wasn’t as good when Alonso returned in 2008, but two more victories followed, albeit with the help of ‘crashgate’ at Singapore. It’d be amazing if Alonso could win again in his third stint with the team…