Hamilton vs Alonso: What really went down between F1 rivals

Lewis Hamilton

Hamilton vs Alonso: What really went down between F1 rivals

Alonso and Hamilton are still not the best friends even to this day

By Sam Cook.

Monday 11 May 2026 19:00

A close member of Fernando Alonso’s inner circle has shed light on just how tense the Spaniard’s rivalry with Lewis Hamilton became during the 2007 season.

Alonso arrived at McLaren after winning back-to-back world championships in 2005 and 2006, joining one of F1’s biggest teams with the aim of adding more titles to his résumé.

McLaren, however, also placed a young British rookie called Lewis Hamilton in the second seat that year, setting up one of the most explosive team-mate battles in modern F1.

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Perfect, right? An experienced champion going for the title, and a rookie learning his way alongside one of the best drivers of his generation.

But Hamilton had other ideas. The boy from Stevenage claimed four grand prix victories that season and came within one point of winning the championship, finishing the season with exactly the same amount of points as Alonso.

Alonso believed that Hamilton was getting preferential treatment because he was British, despite the fact that Alonso was a two-time world champion.

The drivers themselves also rowed, and to this day the pair are not on good terms, despite having grown a lot of respect for one another given they are the oldest drivers on the F1 grid.

The rivalry reared its head once again last year, when Hamilton compared Alonso to British sitcom character Victor Meldrew after Alonso had been complaining over team radio about the seven-time champion's driving.

Now, F1 insider and close ally of Alonso, Antonio Lobato, has opened up on quite how bad the atmosphere within the McLaren team got during the Alonso vs Hamilton season.

"Well, it comes from the fact that Fernando arrives at a new team, British, which has a young driver they’ve been protecting for a long time, who is also British, and who starts the season very well," Lobato told Senen Moran's YouTube channel. "Lewis Hamilton debuts with a podium, right? Among other things because they have a car that is, basically, the strongest at the start of the season.

"And then, of course, imagine this - I’ve done this exercise many times to understand it. Imagine there’s a historic Spanish Formula 1 team, right? That signs a British world champion, a double world champion. But at the same time that same year, you bring up a young Spanish kid you’ve been developing in the junior categories and you put him alongside the world champion, and that little Spaniard, right?

"Hey, he’s close to the world champion. What would the whole team, which is Spanish, with Spanish engineers, Spanish bosses - what would they do? Who would they back? Who would they push?

"But I think in McLaren they didn’t think Hamilton was going to perform at that level, and Fernando himself, I don’t think he thought Hamilton was going to be that strong either.

"In fact, I did an interview - a ‘pirate’ interview, because the team didn’t authorise us that year. McLaren didn’t give us anything at Tele5, absolutely nothing, we were banned. And we did a pirate interview in Brazil that Fernando gave me. And I asked him: ‘Did you underestimate Hamilton at the start of the season?’ And he said, 'yes, maybe yes', because wow, he had a very good season. He had a lot of ambition, a lot of hunger, there was a lot of tension, a lot of alignment with the British press. His father was also very aggressive.

"There were things that weren’t right, but he delivered. I mean, if he had been ours, maybe - if the story had been the other way around - maybe we would have applauded him. But there were some very ugly things throughout that year."

Alonso 'isolated' at McLaren

Lobato then went on to tell an astonishing story about Alonso in McLaren's hospitality, and how the Spaniard was left more and more to his own devices as the season progressed.

"They treated him (Alonso) very badly, they isolated him, they threatened him," Lobato claimed. "A lot of things happened, a lot of things. And I experienced it very closely because I was there many days, inside what I called the glass jungle, which was McLaren’s hospitality area. And I saw it clearly.

"I always tell an anecdote. There was a Spanish waiter called Cesar who served us. He was always there, paying attention to Fernando’s table. Ron Dennis realised there was a good relationship and so on, and he took that waiter and sent him to the third floor.

"To the third floor, and from then on, in the final part of the season, many times if Fernando wanted something, wanted a coffee or anything, he almost had to get up himself to get it because nobody served him.

"So yes, I remember that feeling of isolation that Fernando’s table had, and everyone from other tables almost not even approaching.

"That’s how it was. And Fernando, when the email scandal and all that came out, they put him in a room in Turkey and told him: ‘You’d better think carefully about what you do.’

"Because if the messages come out, making an engine three tenths slower is very easy. And I’m not saying that was the case, but I remember the last race of the year. In that last race where Lewis Hamilton had no other shot because Fernando’s car wasn’t running, wasn’t working, was very slow.

"And they didn’t expect Hamilton’s difficulties at the start of the race, but it was like they removed the other option entirely, because the other option didn’t exist - he didn’t have a competitive car."

Written by

Sam Cook - Digital Journalist

Sam Cook is a talented young sports journalist and social media professional who now specialises in Formula 1, having previously worked as a football journalist and a local news reporter for a variety of different brands.

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F1 Lewis Hamilton McLaren Fernando Alonso