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Alonso holds off charging champion


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Fernando Alonso
Formula One
Renault

IMOLA, Italy -- Renault's championship leader Fernando Alonso held his nerve to keep a charging Michael Schumacher at bay and win a San Marino Grand Prix thriller.

While Alonso celebrated his third win in a row and the French manufacturer's fourth out of four, he was pushed to the limit by the seven-times champion he hopes to dethrone.

Schumacher came from 13th on the grid, after a mistake in final qualifying, to nearly pull off an improbable win. Jenson Button finished third.

Blasting out fastest lap after fastest lap, the German's red Ferrari harried Alonso's blue Renault nose-to-wheel to the checkered flag in the closest race yet this year.

Time and again over the last 12 laps he tried to find a way past and each time the 23-year-old Spaniard closed the door on the wily veteran, winning by just 0.2 of a second.

"This is probably the best of the three that I've had so far," Alonso said. "It was difficult, but at the end I managed to be fast."

"I'm happy in one way from the race. On the other hand, I'm disappointed with what happened this morning," Schumacher said. "We had a stunning pace and performance. That's what we can take from the race."

Briton Button, second at Imola last year after starting on pole, showed BAR were back on the fast track with third place and the Honda-powered team's first points of the season.

Austrian Alexander Wurz, standing-in for injured Colombian Juan Pablo Montoya at McLaren, was fourth with BAR's Japanese Takuma Sato fifth.

Canadian former champion Jacques Villeneuve, his place at Sauber a subject of constant speculation after a poor start to the season, took his first point since leaving BAR in 2003 with sixth place.

Italian Jarno Trulli was seventh for Toyota.

Team-mate Ralf Schumacher came in eighth but picked up a 25 second penalty for what race stewards considered an unsafe incident involving Nick Heidfeld's Williams.

As a consequence Heidfeld moved up to eighth, but Toyota announced they planned to lodge an appeal.

There was major disappointment for McLaren's Kimi Raikkonen, who threw his steering wheel across the team garage in anger after retiring. He had led from pole position until his car slowed on the ninth lap.

Alonso's Italian team mate Giancarlo Fisichella also retired for the third race in a row.

The Spaniard leads the drivers' standings with 36 points from Trulli, who has 18.

Alonso, ever more the heir apparent, and Schumacher made it an afternoon to remember for all the right reasons however.

The Spaniard showed that he has the backbone and determination to go all the way while Schumacher proved that Ferrari were back where they belong.

The new Ferrari F2005, which failed to score a point on its rushed debut at the last race in Bahrain three weeks ago, looked every bit a winner.

It was the first time since 1998 a that anyone outside the Schumacher family had won at Imola, Michael having won for five of the last six years and his brother Ralf winning in 2001.


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