Alonso in scathing Alpine Honda comparison

Fernando Alonso has likened his struggles with Alpine to the misery endured when he drove a Honda-powered McLaren.

The Spaniard was left furious after the Mexico City Grand Prix having experienced a fifth retirement of the season when yet another Renault power unit expired, only three races after the previous issue in Singapore.

Two-time champion Alonso cited 66 points being lost through reliability issues and claimed that all the problems have been on his side of the garage.

When his A522 dropped a cylinder before his retirement, Alonso was audibly disgruntled over the radio.

The messaging evoked memories of his time at McLaren mid-way through last decade, where Alonso was unapologetically ruthless with his opinions over the poor reliability and lack of performance of the now world championship winning engine maker.

Included in his scathing reviews was the ignominy for the Japanese manufacturer of Alonso labelling the engine as a "GP2 engine" at its home race at Suzuka.

Comparing the two situations when asked if he had experienced such misfortune before, Alonso said: "With Honda, we had like 72-place penalties at the end of the year so something like that.

"The thing with Honda, both cars were stopping. This year, it is only car 14."

Asked if the issues were purely down to luck, the Spaniard replied: "We are unprepared.

"The engine cannot finish the races so it cannot be bad luck to change six or seven engines as we did and we are still not finishing the races.

"They have some job to do next winter, hopefully not too much."