From a spectator’s point of view is Alonso joining Renault a good thing in the grand scheme of things?

It’s not an easy question to answer.

What it guarantees (hopefully, barring unforseen circumstances) is that the three best drivers are all going to be at different teams for the next year at least.

Unlike this year where Alonso and Hamilton were both at McLaren, next season will see Hamilton remain at McLaren, Alonso at Renault and Kimi at Ferrari.  Throw a BMW driver or two into the mix and perhaps a Red Bull and it sounds like it could be a good year of racing!

It seems Fernando Alonso is being backed into a corner slightly over where he will be driving next season.

Assuming there is to be no contract breaking going on, then where can he go?

There has been much speculation on this which I won’t go over again, but basically he seems to have a realistic choice between Renault and Toyota - between a team who were once great and could believably be great again, and a team who has loads of money, but are unlikely to be great anytime soon.

There is also a vacant seat at McLaren, but that’s hardly a likely option!

So Fernando Alonso has finally left McLaren once and for all.

Even after all that’s happened this year I’m relatively surprised to be honest, as his best chance of being in a car capable of winning races and the title in 2008 was surely with the Woking team.  Ferrari’s announcement that Massa has been handed a new contract until 2010 has surely scuppered any chance of Alonso joining Raikkonen in Italy next year - that’s assuming Alonso would even have been happy being in the same team as the current World Champion.

This was being billed as a big weekend for English sport - first up today was the final of the Rugby World Cup, followed tomorrow by Lewis Hamilton striving to win the F1 World Championship.

Unfortunately, the first part hasn’t gone to plan, as the English were beaten in a pretty poor, nervy game by South Africa.  There wasn’t a huge amount of good flowing rugby played, and as seems to be the norm these days the emphasis was on kicking penalties and drop goals rather than winning by scoring tries.

Ahead of next weekend’s title deciding showdown in Brazil, there are so many questions flying about.

Obviously, the big one is “Who will win the title?” and that is totally up in the air at the moment - all we can say for sure is that it will be a good battle and we won’t know the outcome until the very end of the race.  Even if Lewis is winning, there is always a chance he will make a mistake or something else will stop him from reaching the finishing line.