Fernando Alonso has finally confirmed reports Mercedes expressed interest in signing him up for 2017.<\/p>\n
Ultimately, the German team replaced the suddenly-retired Nico Rosberg with Valtteri Bottas, but not before a reported round of phone calls to some of F1’s top drivers.<\/p>\n
“I think Rosberg caught Mercedes by surprise and so they made a round of calls to everyone,” Spaniard Alonso told Cadena Cope radio.<\/p>\n
“They even said ‘All the drivers called us’ and I think it may be true. Whether they called them or the drivers called, I think they talked to the entire grid to have information and know every situation.<\/p>\n
“I was no different,” Alonso explained. “Toto Wolff called me in an informative, very calm way but I told him I had a contract with McLaren, that I was happy here and had no plans to do anything crazy.<\/p>\n
“I think they also had a driver profile in mind – a Bottas or Wehrlein type – to fit with the Mercedes programme and not put too many obstacles for Hamilton,” he said.<\/p>\n
“It was a two or three minute conversation and nothing more than information.”<\/p>\n
\u00a9 RIF | GMM<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Fernando Alonso has finally confirmed reports Mercedes expressed interest in signing him up for 2017. Ultimately, the German team replaced the suddenly-retired Nico Rosberg with Valtteri Bottas, but not before a reported round of phone calls to some of F1’s top drivers. “I think Rosberg caught Mercedes by surprise and so they made a round …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":33365,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[3],"tags":[5262,149,5340,5284,34,4,5359,538],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34451"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34451"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34451\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34452,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34451\/revisions\/34452"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}