MOTORSPORT: Champion line-up for Honda

Honda will have the two most experienced drivers in the field when it returns to Formula One next year as the engine supplier to the McLaren team.

It has finally been confirmed that Fernando Alonso is rejoining McLaren and that Jenson Button will be his teammate, relegating Danish youngster Kevin Magnussen to test and reserve driver.

What has not been sorted – or at least publicly clarified yet – is the ownership structure at F1's second oldest team and its major sponsorship, although mega Spanish backing could follow Alonso's signing.

Elsewhere in motorsport, it will be evolution rather than revolution in the World Rally Championship technical rules beyond 2016, while Jamie Whincup and Mick Doohan are in Barbados for this weekend's Race of Champions.

Alonso has won 32, Button 15. The Spaniard has been on the podium 97 times and won two world championships. He's widely regarded as the best driver in F1, although Australia's Daniel Ricciardo is fast mounting a challenge to that claim, and has wriggled out of his Ferrari contract two years early after five seasons there without a title.

Button has been on the podium 50 times and raced for Honda for six years, before the Japanese company offloaded its team in the global financial crisis. The next season he won the world championship with that team, owned briefly by Ross Brawn and suddenly powered by Mercedes, which then turned it into its factory team and has dominated the sport this year.

Mercedes was Alonso's preference as he arranged his exit from Ferrari, but there was no opening with Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg ensconced there.

Alonso had a single, tumultuous season at McLaren in 2007 – the year of Spygate, when the team was found to have obtained masses of Ferrari technical information, was fined US$100 million and stripped of its points in the constructors' world championship.

Alonso was seen as having been a troublemaker that year, but McLaren chief Ron Dennis has now fingered then-rookie Hamilton as the instigator of much of the friction that escalated into warfare.

Alonso and Dennis both admit to regrets from that season but insist they can work together again as McLaren and Honda try to repeat the glory they enjoyed together in the late 1980s and early '90s.

However, they acknowledge that success may take time. McLaren needs to produce a more competitive chassis after two years without a win, while Honda is arriving in the new era of hybrid power units a year behind Mercedes, Renault and Ferrari – although that may prove to be an advantage.

Dennis has been trying to raise money – perhaps as much as US$300 million – to increase his stake in McLaren to achieve financial control. It is said the plan is that he relieve Bahraini sovereign investment company Mumtalakat and the Ojeh family's TAG Group of half of their respective 50 and 25 per cent shareholdings, which would take Dennis to 62.5 per cent.

He ousted former team principal Martin Whitmarsh early this year as the first step in regaining charge of the team he built into a powerhouse and which he has vowed must again win GPs and world titles.

While initial track testing of Honda's new power unit has been troubled and Honda motorsport boss Yasuhisa Arai played little part in the driver announcement, Dennis was beaming at having put together a "supremely experienced" pairing.

"We now have, by an order of magnitude, the best driver line-up of any F1 team," Dennis said.

McLaren had been wooing Alonso back for more than a year and signed him "a little while ago", while Dennis admitted he had had "causes of concern" about Button but they had been overcome in an exhaustive selection process.

Alonso, 33, said he had been happy with his F1 career apart from 2007.

"I didn't achieve or deliver the best of myself [that year at McLaren]," he said.

"Now I arrive to finish the job that I started in 2007."

Button, 34, was "very pleased to have been invited to do my bit and am absolutely raring to go".

"To race alongside this guy [Alonso] is a big challenge, but an exciting challenge," he said.

Alonso beat Ferrari teammate and another world champion, Kimi Raikkonen, 16-3 in qualifying this year and 17-2 in the races. Senior engineer Rob Smedley, who worked with Michael Schumacher at Ferrari and then Alonso, has said of the Spaniard: "Fernando is the very best driver of his generation … if not the best ever. He is that good. He brings that much performance to the team. I don't think there is anyone in F1 who could live [compete] with him."

Magnussen at times was favoured for the second McLaren seat, but Button – a master racer but not renowned as a great qualifier – outpaced him 10-9 in qualifying this year and scored 122 world championship points to the 22-year-old Dane's 55.

Honda has quietly got what it wanted for its F1 comeback – a pair of proven winners in the cockpits. There will be teething troubles, but it may prove to be a bigger challenger to Mercedes than Renault or Ferrari.

Finn Mahonen said the wide-ranging changes that had been talked about have been abandoned.

He dismissed talk of hybrid technology in world rallying from 2017 but denied that would deter Toyota from returning to the sport.

"It's too early to have hybrids in rallying," Mahonen said.

"We have discussed introducing different sizes of engines by controlling the fuel flow and this kind of thing, but it's so expensive and unreliable at this stage.

"We will [continue to] see conventional cars, an evolution of what we have now."

The WRC Commission had wanted the 2017 rules finalised by this month, but Mahonen said the timeframe now was the World Motor Sport Council meeting in March.

Champions from around globe in seventh heaven
Seven types of vehicle will be used at this weekend's Race of Champions.

A fleet of 600-horsepower, four-wheel-drive Volkswagen Polo RXs from the World Rallycross Championship and which accelerate from nought to 100km in 1.9 seconds have arrived in Barbados to join the special ROC cars, Audi R8 LMSs, KTM X-Bows, Euro NASCARs, the Ariel Atom Cup open-wheeler and American Robby Gordon's Stadium Super Trucks in the line-up.

Australia's six-time V8 Supercar champion Jamie Whincup and five-time 500cc motorcycle world champion Mick Doohan will compete in them against stars from Formula One, the World Endurance Championship, NASCAR, IndyCar, the World Touring Car Championship and World Rallycross.

The Bushy Park track in Barbados is twice as long as those of recent years – most recently in Bangkok in 2012. Drivers will still battle head to head in two parallel lanes linked by a crossover bridge.

The Nations Cup will be held on Saturday with competition for the individual Champion of Champions on Sunday, when Whincup is drawn first-up to race the reigning champ, French F1 driver Romain Grosjean, while Doohan will take on David Coulthard.  

Williams F1 test driver Susie Wolff will be the first woman to compete at the ROC and will partner Coulthard in Scotland's Nations Cup team.