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Fernando Alonso’s 2014 Italian Grand Prix Retirement Came at Best Possible Time
Published: September 8, 2014
The Spaniard entered the Monza weekend, the 15th round of the 2006 season, with a 12-point lead over Michael Schumacher in the Drivers' Championship.
He, after triumphing in six of the opening nine race of the campaign, was without a win in five events, in which time his title rival had secured three successive victories.
The momentum was changing; something had to give.
And it was Alonso's car that did so, with plumes of smoke billowing from the rear of his Renault R26 as he approached Monza's first chicane.
The home crowd cheered and jeered—so loudly, in fact, that their hurrahs and their air horns could be heard above the nearly deafening screech of the V8 engines.
They reveled in the arrival of a green crane to take his car to the scrap heap.
They punched the air, they rattled the catch fencing, and they jumped up and down as Alonso—head lowered, helmet still on—fled the scene and contemplated the loss of another 10 points to Schumacher, the Ferrari driver.
Fast-forward eight years, and Alonso is the hero, the one glimmer of hope in a season, an era, of disrepair.
The blue and yellow of Renault, after the grey of McLaren and the white, yellow and orange of his second spell at Renault, has been replaced with red.
Scarlet red. Ferrari red.
His demise, at the exact spot where he withdrew from the 2006 event, was not greeted with delight but with a stunned silence.
The adoring crowd, naturally, edged forward—but those cheers and jeers of eight years ago were replaced with a round of polite, muted, sympathetic applause.
That green crane again tiptoed its way to Alonso's stricken vehicle—but this time with all the glory of a pallbearer.
And the driver ...
Article Source: Bleacher Report - Formula 1
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