Monaghan admitted he felt guilty towards Alonso

Red Bull Racing chief engineer Paul Monaghan was once Fernando Alonso’s race engineer at Renault and shared the joy of winning races with him, and in 2005-2006. and in the World Championship. Then the Briton moved to Red Bull and Alonso to McLaren, and everyone remembers how his career developed then.

Perhaps things would have been much different if Fernando had joined Red Bull after one season at McLaren, but that didn’t happen.

“Maybe he should sign a contract with Red Bull for 2008, don’t you think? But you have to ask him about it, I don’t know the answer,” Monaghan reasoned while speaking on the Beyond the Grid podcast. – Fernando is a very focused racer who tries to achieve the best possible results every day.

There is no way that he works half-heartedly on a particular day or in a particular session; he is distinguished by an unwavering self-confidence. But he is also a very good person and I have always enjoyed communicating with him. I hope that he and I do the same.

In 2010, when Alonso was already driving for Ferrari, he was close to winning the championship. We saw him that Sunday night in Abu Dhabi, and he looked like a double-edged sword. Vettel won the title then and I was happy to be working in the winning team. I was happy for Sebastian, but at the same time I was worried about Fernando.

I came to the Ferrari pits, spoke to his entourage and then went up to him and said: “You did well, you had a good season, although it’s a shame you couldn’t win the title.” And there were no hard feelings between us.

In 2012 he claimed the title again, was again our strongest rival and we managed to win the championship at the last moment in the last race of the season in Brazil. It was interesting to fight with Fernando, we understood that he was a phenomenal driver, so we had to give everything and somehow managed to prevail.

You could say that I even had a certain sense of guilt, but at the same time it is a privilege to be able to compete with a talented rider at this level.”

Monaghan also recalled events from more than 20 years ago, about Alonso’s very first tests with Renault, when the Spaniard was still a test driver for the French company’s works team: “We were doing tests at the end of 2002. At the end of the day we changed the settings of the car, put new tyres on and Fernando’s lap time was absolutely sensational.

Then this 20-year-old guy came to me and said that the changes in the settings didn’t have much effect, he stepped up a little bit himself, attacked a little bit more aggressively in some parts of the circle, and it worked. And already then I had the feeling that together we would achieve a lot.”