FERNANDO ALONSO, two-time world champion, would-be scourge of Lewis Hamilton, and alleged sneak, claimed and looked to be a happy man at the beginning of the final testing session of the Formula One preseason in Barcelona last week.

The hangdog demeanour taken on towards the end of last season had lifted, and something of the spirit of the young star who not so long ago was being acclaimed for wresting his sport from the grip of Michael Schumacher had returned. Away from McLaren, away from Hamilton, and back in the comfort zone with Renault, Alonso had self-evidently relaxed.

Sufficiently to give his side of the story about that phone call to McLaren boss Ron Dennis after the Hungarian Grand Prix last year, when Dennis said the Spaniard threatened to shop his own team over the Ferrari Spygate incident, unless it accorded him No 1 status?

Pause. “I will not comment, I will not comment. Same as last year. I think at the end of 2007 I have great memories, two victories, fighting for the championship until the last lap of the Brazil race, and although many things have been said I feel very happy right now, today, and that’s the important thing.” Had the British press been fair? “No, no.” Because Hamilton is English and he isn’t? “Yeah. And all the things that happen in the year. At the end of the year everybody saw the reality, so for sure some parts of the season many things have been said about me that no-one regrets when they knew it was not true.”

That Alonso may be due a retraction or two is a matter of opinion. That he is in a better place, for him, is not, even if he admitted Renault are unlikely to be competing at the sharp end of a Grand Prix for some time.

“We are not so close at the moment to the top teams but it’s the way it is, and it’s up to us to work better than those. Last season Renault finished the championship one second and a half, maybe two seconds behind the winning cars, and it’s impossible to recover this amount just in three or four months.

“But the team is doing a good job, the wind tunnel now is working properly, last year they had problems there, so everything is new, and there is still a lot to discover and improve, so that is the hope we have.”

But surely the changes to F1 this season, the removal of driver aids like launch control and traction control, will give the best drivers – like him – a chance to make up for at least part of any performance differences?

Alonso is less enthusiastic than some might have expected. “Maybe it’s a good thing, but we are making F1 not the highest technology in the world. Everybody looking at F1 from the outside sees it as the maximum, but if [the feeder series] GP2 keeps improving, and keeps their slick tyres, they will do our time laps very soon while we are going back to the past.”

Another problem, according to him, is that the reforms leave little scope to improve the cars. “If in the past the car was not performing well from the beginning, maybe you could improve it with the tyres and the engine. Now if the car is good in January, you will have a good season. If the car is bad you will have a bad season, because you cannot do anything to the car.“

He is prepared to work hard in the cause, he said. “I feel more comfortable, happier, because I feel very good with these people and I feel a lot of respect about everybody for me so I’m really motivated every day. I wake up to work hard for this team because they deserve it.”

The implication would appear to be that McLaren did not.

He does not expect there to be an ongoing hostile reaction to him from British supporters, or, to Hamilton from Spanish fans, despite evidence to the contrary. “I don’t think so, because these things happen. I remember Monza, I won the race last year in front of the Ferrari fans, and obviously I’m in the car, but I was lucky I don’t hear what they said! But one thing is the fans, the enthusiasts and another different thing is the racists.”

The racism incident itself, when Spanish supporters wore black make-up and mocked Hamilton and his family, he says he did not see. “It’s much better to have a recording of something, to see exactly at first hand what happened. Reading the newspapers it’s difficult to be sure bad things have been said, or racism has been the case. But I’m sure if anything happened it was a minority.

“I don’t think the Spanish fans are these type of people, because you know we have 48,000 fans at Valencia for a test day and here 25,000. To say something bad about the Spanish fans is also not fair.”

The interview took place at the end of the first day of the test. By the end of the third and final day, Alonso’s quickest lap times were almost two seconds behind those of the front-running Hamilton, and he was suggesting the Briton was at least partly to blame for being “jeered”, for saying Alonso had “shown him how not to behave as a world champion”.

In Formula One, as Alonso found last season, things change quickly.