Fernando Alonso has said he was left frustrated after being lapped by both Ferrari’s during the Chinese Grand Prix. The Spaniard described it as “not the best feeling at all” after his old team lapped him.
Alonso completed his first full race distance in the MP4-30 since returning to the team for 2015. The double world champion finished in 12th with team-mate Jenson Button in 14th after the Brit got a five second penalty after the race for contact with Lotuses Pastor Maldonado.
Alonso left Ferrari after five frustrating seasons, missing out on the world title twice at the last race of the season by the man who replaced him at the Scuderia, Sebastian Vettel. He does believe however that McLaren finishing outside of the points will come to an end soon.
“Obviously, it’s not the best feeling, at all, but we know that it’s the way it is at the moment and we think that it’s not going to be for too long,” Alonso said. “It’s just for a few races now at the beginning.”
For the opening races, Honda have ran on limited power due to fears of reliability and possible penalties given out later in the season. Alonso has already lost one engine after his car, being driven by Kevin Magnussen at the time stopped on the way to the grid in Australia.
“I’m sure we learnt many things. We are still a little bit blind with the car; we still need to get a lot of information to extract from the package. Today, finishing both cars was a lot of useful information for us and trying to understand the car better,”
“My longest run in winter testing was 12 laps, in Malaysia I did 22 laps, today I completed the race, so it was very useful for me as well. We had a small issue in the middle stint with the aerodynamics of the car, we have some extra oversteer we need to control. We are not so fast and also we have some problems and were even slower!”
Despite their struggles, Alonso and everyone at McLaren remain confident that the partnership of McLaren and Honda can be rewarding once again as it was in the days of Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost.
“I think we are all very satisfied, we are all very happy with progress in all areas. The car is improving a lot every weekend. Power unit, aerodynamic, reliability, everything is getting better and better. The starting point was too low, that’s the only thing, so the first couple of races are a test for us but we want to come back in a competitive basis very soon.”
