Alonso to leave F1 at the end of 2018

I would like to see the onboard from K Mag..for all we know he could have pulled alongside Nando halfway down the straight ..then Nando speeds up again ..who knows?

 

Why would he pull alongside though? He should have been maintaining his gap the way Alonso and everyone else were. Listen to the radio. The McLaren pitwall has SIR, GAS, STR, and ALO all with 2s gaps, which is reasonable.

 

There are a number of reason why Alonso could have slowed down so much before Parabolica that Magnussen who followed couldn't know ( technical failure, aborted lap, etc ...),.
It was reasonable for the Dane to assume he couldn't stay behind and had to overtake.
That's the normal reaction in these circumstances, mostly if you are warming up for your last lap in a qualy session.
Imagine his surprise when he saw that Alonso, far from being in trouble, was just "fishing" for a tow to get a better lap time, at his expense!

 

They have a bit of previous lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QftfXbnoeQs

 

Watching that video Stroll looks a lot closer to Gasly than Nando is to Stroll.

 

Hard to tell as Gasly is hidden by Stroll most of the time. STR seems about half a second closer to GAS for most of the lap, but STR & GAS do appear to bunch up just a little more right before Parabolica as GAS backs off a bit from SIR. Of course, STR doesn't go flying by though. The main thing I'm looking for though is that ALO is maintaining a pretty constant gap to STR ahead, not slowing relative to him. Then when MAG flies by ALO with about 175M to Parabolica, ALO would only have 3 or 4 seconds remaining to create a new gap to MAG.

 

Nando realised late he was too far behind Stroll so he backed off to tuck in behind KMag ?

 

That's the thing, he maintained that gap all the way around the circuit. There's nothing there indicating he backed off at all.