Fernando Alonso on McLaren’s 2018 season

Fernando Alonso must be sitting a little easy today, after having secured 5th position in the Australian Grand Prix, following an exit in Q2 during Qualifying on Saturday.

The McLaren F1 team has suffered a painful time during Testing when every lap the car did seemed like a tumultuous one for the team and for Fernando Alonso.

However, after they got over all the tyre failures and exhaust issues, the McLaren did put up some nice lap times in Barcelona, followed by a decent enough qualifying on Saturday.

The switch from Honda to Renualt for McLaren was supposed to bring in more reliability and Alonso had earlier spoken about how the MCL33 would be more competitive during races than during qualifying.

He spoke about something similar post the race today and was satisfied with how the weekend turned out for the Woking based F1 team.

“It was a good race today, especially considering where we started,” commented Alonso.

“The last couple of years have been difficult, and I think the winter has been difficult as well.

“We switched to the Renault engine quite late and the team had to react very quickly to redesign some of the parts at the rear end, and now we’ve come here and both cars have scored points – one in the top five.

“We should be proud of that, but I think there’s a lot more to come from McLaren. We didn’t maximise the full potential nor squeeze everything out of the package today.

“This is only our first race together with Renault, and some updates will come in the next few races. We can start to look ahead a little bit and Red Bull will be the next target.

“As I said before, this race is probably our lowest performance of this season as things are going to get better and better.” he added.

However, Alonso did concede to the fact that McLaren and himself got really lucky to end with P5, thanks to both the Haas cars facing car troubles during the race.

“Let’s say four positions came thanks to some favourable conditions, but we made no mistakes and we capitalised on everything. A perfect job from the team.” Alonso concluded.