Fernando Alonso: I won't retire until I've won a third F1 world championship

Ferrari's Fernando Alonso has said that he will not retire from Formula 1 until he has secured his third world title.

Alonso's lifetime ambition has been to equal Ayrton Senna's three world titles and after winning the first two early in his career, with Renault in 2005/2006, he has endured a long drought while waiting for the third. In that time the Spaniard, who will turn 33 this summer, has seen younger drivers Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel come in and clinch titles.

And with Ferrari undergoing a restructuring under new team principal Marco Mattiacci, it has prompted speculation as to whether time might run out for him to win that elusive third title,

"This is the main goal and you don't think of retiring until you get some satisfaction. It is something I am working for and hoping for," he told the BBC for its TV coverage of this weekend's Canadian Grand Prix.

"It is not that I'm not happy with two but the third puts you in a list of very important names."

"I think I can carry on long enough to win and to be competitive for some good years. I don't know how many - three, five, seven. I don't think it should be any problem."

Although his main motivation is to clinch that third title, he is not motivated by driving the current cars. In the BBC interview, Alonso was critical of the 2014 hybrid turbo cars, claiming that they are not as sharp or challenging to drive on the limit,

"The new F1 cars are heavier, slower, difficult to understand what the car is doing, you cannot push all through the race," he said.

"You push two laps and then you save tyres until the next stop. Sometimes you don't even push. This is not something racing drivers like to do.

"It is not a problem of how long you can keep this level, it's a problem of how much fun I will have driving those cars in the future."

Alonso also took the opportunity to deny a rift with Ferrari president Luca Montezemolo after last summer's "ear tweaking" episode, where the president chided him publicly for his critical comments about Ferrari.