Ranking Fernando Alonso's Top 5 Ferrari Drives

Fernando Alonso and Ferrari was the partnership that promised so much but delivered so very little.

Despite dedicating his soul to the Prancing Horse for five seasons, the Spaniard only has 11 grand prix wins to show for his efforts with the Italian team.

Although he failed to secure that elusive third world championship—just missing out in 2010 and 2012—Alonso produced some of the finest performances of his career behind the wheel of a red car as he solidified his status as the most complete driver in Formula One.

Whenever he recognised a chance to win, Alonso often made it happen, making his experience count in tricky conditions—as he did at Malaysia in 2012, for instance—or by running solely on sheer will power, as he did so sensationally to win on home soil later that year.

Here are Alonso's top five races for Ferrari, with our choices based on the brilliance and shrewdness of his performances.

The 2010 Bahrain Grand Prix saw Alonso win on his Ferrari debut, with the Spaniard helped by a mechanical issue on Sebastian Vettel's Red Bull.

His victory in the Italian Grand Prix later that season, meanwhile—his only win for the Prancing Horse at Monza—must also be considered a highlight of his Ferrari tenure and was achieved after a strong fight with Jenson Button, his 2015 McLaren team-mate.

Alonso's only chance of a win in 2011 was at the British Grand Prix, where the short-lived ban on off-throttle diffusers came into effect, and he did not let the opportunity pass.

His battling drive to second in the 2012 Brazilian Grand Prix, where he missed out on the title to Vettel by three points, was an admirable last-gasp effort at wrestling the crown from the German's grasp and was the scene of that double-overtake on Felipe Massa and Mark Webber.

The 33-year-old's 2013 Spanish Grand Prix win was his most recent trip to the top step of the podium, while his third-place finish in this year's Chinese Grand Prix was a minor miracle.

In his time with Ferrari, Alonso finished as the runner-up to Sebastian Vettel in the drivers' championship on three occasions but only rarely have the pair met on the track.

Aside from the 14-lap scrap at Silverstone between them this year, you would probably have to go back to the 2010 Singapore Grand Prix to find the last time both Vettel and Alonso fought on truly even ground.

And in a straight fight at the Marina Bay street circuit, it was the Spaniard who triumphed over the Red Bull driver, who was at that time still gunning for his maiden title.

Alonso set the last of only two dry weather poles for Ferrari on the Saturday, before defending his position with an aggressive manoeuvre at the start of the race.

Although Vettel harried him throughout the grand prix—finishing just 0.2 seconds behind the Ferrari at the chequered flag, as per Formula1.com—Alonso oozed calm and control to take his second win at the track.

After the controversy of his 2008 win came the class of his 2010 Singapore GP success, yet the fact that Alonso tends to perform at his best when the odds are against him leaves this race in fifth.

A new location. A torrential downpour. Plenty of uncertainty. And lots of tension.

The 2010 Korean Grand Prix was almost tailor-made for Alonso to work his magic and he did not disappoint.

Despite finding the time to complain about the weather conditions prior to a red flag stoppage, Alonso kept his head on an afternoon when many of his rivals lost theirs.

While Jenson Button endured one of the most miserable races of his life, championship leader Mark Webber made a grave error to crash out and Sebastian Vettel suffered a mechanical failure while leading. Alonso, though, kept it clean and was ultimately rewarded with victory.

As Vettel's engine began to show signs of dying just 10 laps from the chequered flag, Alonso was there to immediately pick up the pieces and inherit the lead.

His pace, once at the front, was astonishing and allowed him to take the win by 14.9 seconds, as per the official F1 website, from Lewis Hamilton, who was barely a second adrift of the Ferrari at the time of Vettel's failure.

The win allowed Alonso to overtake Webber and establish an 11-point lead in the drivers' standings, but two wins in the final two races for Vettel saw the title head to the Red Bull driver.

The German Grand Prix of 2010 was one of the few occasions when Felipe Massa had the edge over Alonso during their four-season spell as team-mates.

Yet the fact that Alonso still emerged as the race winner at Hockenheim underlined his influence over the team just halfway through his debut season at the Prancing Horse.

After nipping into the lead at the start as Sebastian Vettel, the pole-sitter, swerved across the track to cover Alonso, Massa led relatively comfortably from the sister Ferrari on the first anniversary of his life-threatening crash in Hungary.

That was, of course, until the Brazilian received a team order, which simply advised him: "Fernando is faster than you."

It was a coded instruction to move aside and Massa duly obliged, slowing on the exit of the hairpin on the following lap to gift his team-mate the win.

Alonso, after cutting an awkward figure on the podium, was peppered with criticism in a feisty post-race press conference, but the true significance of the German GP only became clear after the event.

Having flexed his political muscle, the Spaniard—like Michael Schumacher before him—ensured that Ferrari was based around him and him alone.

In third, the 2010 German GP confirmed, if it were ever in doubt, that Alonso and Ferrari were a force to be reckoned with.

In the early stages of the 2012 season, Ferrari's car was a glorified truck.

The F2012 betrayed its driver at the season opener in Australia, tossing Alonso into the gravel during qualifying—he somehow dragged it to fifth in the race—and fared only slightly better on Saturday in Malaysia, where the Spaniard qualified ninth.

Yet the vices of his machinery didn't stop Alonso, who went on to win the race at Sepang.

In a grand prix that was suspended for almost an hour due to heavy rain—which presumably gave the Ferrari man plenty of time to devise a cunning plan—it took just 16 laps for Alonso to claim the lead as his rivals ran into trouble.

He withstood a late challenge from Sauber's Sergio Perez, whose chances of victory were ended when he ran wide, making the kind of mistake that would normally have been reserved for the driver under pressure. It was perhaps an indication of the strength of Alonso's character and how he is viewed by his less accomplished peers.

The Malaysia win injected both driver and team with a renewed sense of belief, laying the foundations for Alonso's 2012 title assault.

But there was even more to come.

Not for the first nor the last time, a strategic error on Ferrari's part resulted in their star driver underachieving on the track.

The team's decision to use just one set of soft tyres in Q2 left Alonso qualifying a distant 11th for his second home race of the season at the Valencia street circuit.

Despite his lowly grid position, he refused to let his head drop and came out fighting the following day.

A strong start saw Alonso jump to eighth on the first lap and he found himself in third during a mid-race safety car period, which eradicated Sebastian Vettel's hefty lead.

Sensing his opportunity, Alonso wasted no time at the restart, bravely squeezing his way around the outside of the untamed Romain Grosjean at Turn 1. Only a handful of corners later, he inherited first place after Vettel retired with an alternator problem. 

From that point, the result was never in doubt.

The two-time champion took an emotional win, abandoning his car on the cool-down lap to celebrate with the home crowd before being moved to tears during the belated podium ceremony.

Like Nigel Mansell at Silverstone and Ayrton Senna at Interlagos, Alonso's European Grand Prix win was the result of people power and a driver's determined spirit.

It was Fernando at his opportunistic, brilliant best and the undisputed peak of his Ferrari career.