now in his 4th season for the Scuderia, Fernando Alonso will celebrate his 200th Grand Prix this weekend –in what is suspected- usual hot conditions in Malaysia. Not only is this his 200th start in an official F1-race, but his 60th start for Ferrari as well.
In 2001 he joined Minardi to start at the Australian GP as his first race. He raced a total of 17 races for the team. From 2003 to 2006 and again for the years 2008 and 2009 he was engaged by the Renault team for a total of 105 races, representing more than half of Alonso’s races, including the win that was helped by the “stage-managed” crash of Nelson Piquet jun. in Singapore. We all remember as well the difficult time of McLaren having two Champions under contract, one of them being Alonso for 17 races in 2007.
It took Alonso 19 races to achieve his first podium (Malaysia in 2003, starting from pole, coming in 3rd) and 30 races to triumph for the first time (2003 in Hungary again, starting from pole). For the admirers of statistics, Alonso wins about 15 % of all races he participated in, nearly every second race provided him a place on the podium.
Alonso is a two time F1-World Champion (2005 and 2006 on Renault). In each of his Championship-seasons he was able to win 7 races.
On March 14th 2010, Alonso made his first appearance in a Ferrari Formula car in Bahrain, using F10 #283 and took the win in his first race for the Scuderia. In total he achieved 9 victories in his 59 starts for Ferrari up to now. His success of achieving pole position is more or less small; he has reached four of them in his 59 starts – what might reflect the weakness of Ferrari at the moment as he was able to achieve 18 pole positions with his previous teams. With Ferrari he didn’t reach the finish line only three times; two of those races come from the 2012 season and may have cost him his third Championship title.