McLaren had hoped for a ‘reliable’ winter testing after having moved on from the Honda engine that was apparently the reason for all of McLaren’s reliability issues in the past few years.
However, the departure of Honda hasn’t quite pushed the ‘reliability’ issues out of the door, instead have brought maybe more of them in.
The McLaren has halted multiple times on the track this winter testing, raising serious questions around the new MCL33, which was supposed to lead McLaren to glory.
Boullier though has appeased all McLaren fans by claiming all the faults with the car to be very minor and nothing to be worried about, but every time that ‘pappaya’ machine steps out on the track, it ends up halting on it.
Fernando Alonso is of the same thought has Boullier, and feels that the MCL33 is ready for the Australian GP, even if it was tomorrow.
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“In terms of the fundamental answers we needed to gather over the winter test, they are already OK and we have all of them — so I don’t need the last day to be honest,” Alonso said.
“I will be in the car, I will drive and hopefully we will keep discovering new things on the car, but if Australia was tomorrow it’s OK.” he added.
Alonso feels that such things are very normal with respect to testing and it is only because of the amount of media around that every ‘red flag’ is being treated as it is today.
“I think this is more or less normal in every new car,” he added.
“I am 18 years in [to my F1 career] 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 OK and there is nothing fundamentally a problem with the car.
“The issues we had are well under control but unfortunately we keep discovering small things every day. That is putting us in a strong position for Australia in the way we can enforce these small issues. As I said before, it is better it happens here than in two weeks’ time.” Alonso concluded
