Fernando Alonso says he was “happy” with the mileage he put in during Wednesday’s final in-season testing session, as the McLaren-Honda driver racked up 104 laps in Austria.
The Spaniard was coming off another torrid race weekend that saw him suffer fresh reliability issues, serve a mammoth 25-place grid penalty, and finally retire on the opening lap following a scary shunt with Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen.
Alonso took over from test and development driver Stoffel Vandoorne and though he finished a quiet seventh on the leaderboard, the double world champion was pleased to enjoyed some trouble-free running at the Red Bull Ring.
“It was a positive day,” said Alonso. “The most important thing was to put some laps on the car after the problems we’ve had in the last couple of races. We managed to complete more than 100 laps, and, together with Stoffel’s laps on Tuesday, I think we finished the test with some good information.
“Now, we need to go back to the factory and analyse everything, but we definitely have a lot of data to go forward with. I’m pretty happy with how the test has gone.”
Alonso made the most of his prolonged track time to trial various updated aero components on the MP4-30, including the new shorter nosecone McLaren-Honda brought to Spielberg.
McLaren-Honda team manager Dave Redding was equally buoyant after the test and hopes this has enabled the Woking-based outfit to lay the groundwork for moving closer to the frontrunners.
“Overall, we were able to make the most of the good weather and dry track conditions to complete solid sections of the test programme to our satisfaction,” said Redding.
Both days of the test have been productive – and most importantly, reliable – and we are now armed with lots of valuable data and useful feedback from both drivers, that we can take away and analyse in preparation for the next two races before the summer break.”
Click here for pictures from the final day of in-season testing in Austria
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