Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsMcLaren

Alonso sees opportunities for McLaren

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Fernando Alonso believes the rain-interrupted practice session will create opportunities for McLaren during qualifying for the Monaco Grand Prix.

Roberto Merhi crashed after 20 minutes of FP2, with rain then beginning to fall in the red flag period while the Manor was being recovered. Alonso was eighth at the time and finished in the same position with no driver able to improve their time as all of the teams missed out on dry running on the supersoft tyre.

Asked if eighth was representative of where McLaren can be this weekend, Alonso replied: "I don’t know, I don’t have the crystal ball to see into the future.

"I will try to do my best on Saturday. The conditions are changing and nobody had the chance to run the super-soft and that is probably good news for us because it will be some kind of unknown situation for everyone in qualifying and we can take advantage of the difficulties for everyone. Let’s hope to have a good Saturday and a good grid position."

And Alonso believes McLaren will be more competitive either way due to the lack of reliance on the power unit in Monaco.

"This is a very low power effect circuit, so the engine counts very little here and that makes us more competitive because there are very short straights and the chassis is responding well all through the season. Hopefully we can put some good laps in on Saturday, but we will see because in qualifying everybody seems to improve and we don’t know until Saturday afternoon."

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.