F1 news: Why Fernando Alonso remains optimistic over McLaren’s 2018 chances

McLaren have covered less miles than any of the 10 teams carrying out pre-season testing at the Circuit de Catalunya in Barcelona.

Despite their switch of engine suppliers from Honda to Renault, their winter testing has been dogged by problems for a second successive year. 

Reliability issues wrecked their running again on Wednesday with Alonso halted on track with an oil leak after Stoffel Vandoorne suffered from electrical problems and a hydraulics fault the day before.

Yet racing director Eric Boullier has remained confident that McLaren are simply getting to understand their car by experimenting with various tweaks and different set-ups.

And Alonso too remains optimistic about the season ahead for the Surrey team.

“I think this is more or less normal in every new car,” the Spaniard told Formula One’s official website. “I am 18 years in and in winter testing I keep discovering things every year.

“It is the same not only in winter testing but before when testing was free we would test in between races like before Monaco and Canada going to Paul Ricard and doing 20 laps a day and there was no coverage.

“Now I understand we have hundreds of media so every red flag attracts a lot of attention.

“But from a team point of view we are more or less okay and there is nothing fundamentally a problem with the car. The issues we had are well under control.

“Unfortunately we keep discovering small things every day but that is putting us in a strong position for Australia in the way we can enforce these small issues.

“It is better it happens here than in two weeks’ time.”

Alonso will sit out of testing on Thursday with team-mate Vandoorne taking over. Friday will be his final day in the car before the first practice session of the first race of the season at the Australian Grand Prix on Friday March 23.

And the two-time world champion believes that McLaren will be well prepared for the new season.

“We probably need the last day [of testing] to do some laps, some long runs, to check extra things that you always discover about the new car,” Alonso admitted.

“But in terms of fundamental answers that we need over the winter test, they are already okay and we have all of them. So I don’t need the last day to be honest.

“I will be in the car, I will drive – hopefully we will keep discovering new things on the car – but if Australia was tomorrow it’s okay.”

McLaren lost three hours of running on Wednesday with Alonso completing only 57 laps – a huge contrast to that of Red Bull’s Daniel Ricciardo, who managed the most with 165.

But Alonso – who only returned for the final 13 minutes of running – is not overly concerned and suggests that the issues will even help the team in the long term.

He continued: “The problem was a little bit longer obviously that [McLaren only completed] 50 laps, but at the end of the day we discovered things – yesterday with Stoffel [Vandoorne] and today with myself.

“But this is part of testing and hopefully these things won’t happen in lap 10 in Melbourne.

“So in a way I’m happy to keep making the car stronger and stronger. All the important parts and all the important things in the programme we managed to do in the morning.

“The rest of the day was going to be about long runs and putting laps on the car but we did not need any information at that time. So I am not too stressed about the laps we lost.”