Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsMcLaren

Failure shows McLaren is 'too fragile' - Alonso

Fernando Alonso is downbeat about his chances of a competitive Monaco Grand Prix after stopping during Q2.

With McLaren looking capable of reaching Q3, Alonso had yet to set a time in the second part of qualifying when he pulled off to the inside of the track at Ste Devote. While the problem has yet to be confirmed, Alonso believes it was an electrical issue and says there is little hope of salvaging a good result from the race.

“The problem I think is something electrical because the car completely switched off in the middle of the straight," Alonso said. "I had no power, no electricity, no light on the steering wheel, so something electrical.

"I don’t want to sound too pessimistic but this is the Monaco Grand Prix, so the race is Saturday. There is a train of cars on Sunday and we’re starting 15^th, but hopefully we can get some experience, we can do some laps and to improve the performance and the reliability because we are too fragile at the moment."

While Alonso qualified 15th, he will actually start from P13 due to penalties for Romain Grosjean and Carlos Sainz. While that may lead to a chance of scoring points, Alonso says reliability is costing McLaren much stronger results.

"We were P3 and P6 this morning in FP3 when we had no traffic. Perhaps that is a bit optimistic, but sixth, seventh, eighth position we could fit both cars. Unfortunately we could not manage to deliver he result today. Next time we need to improve performance and reliability because we are a bit too fragile at the moment."

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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.