Fernando Alonso has retracted his complaint towards Romain Grosjean after suggesting the Haas driver had illegally overtaken him under the Virtual Safety Car period at the Hungarian Grand Prix.

Alonso had complained over team radio when Grosjean got by on lap seven following the Virtual Safety Car. "Grosjean passed me under the Safety Car. I was right on the delta so I don't know," Alonso said over team radio.

The stewards chose not to investigate the move and when reflecting on it, Alonso backtracked on his initial complaint and praised Grosjean for his opportunism.

"With Grosjean, I felt like he stole my wallet! He just did a better job; we have a few seconds' warning the VSC is about to finish, so I was trying to get close to the delta time I was given, between half a second and zero, the ideal is to be within 0,1s and when I got the green light I accelerated immediately, but by then Grosjean was already alongside me, so he must have done a perfect job, with the right timing. I lost the position there but thanks to the pit wall I got it back soon after."

Grosjean managed to get ahead of Alonso shortly after the Virtual Safety Car. Dan Istitene/Getty Images

The Spaniard eventually finished eighth, behind Pierre Gasly and Kevin Magnussen in the race for best of the rest. Alonso managed to jump ahead of Grosjean, Brendon Hartley and Carlos Sainz thanks to McLaren decision to extend Alonso's first stint which meant he had free air.

"The races are on Sunday, many people get very happy on Saturdays but come Sunday they don't score points,'' Alonso added. "I think we did a good race, particularly the strategy was really good today, we managed to extend the first stint by quite a bit and managed to get both cars into the points, in 8th and 9th place, which was really great, so a big thank you to the pit wall. Then, of course, Stoffel had an issue, but at least we managed to score a few points.

"We didn't really have a fixed strategy when we went into the race. We had thought we would stop between laps 20 and 25 but, in the end, we want almost all the way to lap 40 because we could see Ocon was holding the group we had been fighting with and every extra lap we managed to get was worth gold. We tried to extend the first stint as much as possible and it worked out fine.''

Alonso now sits ninth in the championship, a point behind Magnussen.