Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsMcLaren

'We are slow' - Alonso

Fernando Alonso gave a blunt assessment of McLaren's pace following Friday practice for the British Grand Prix.

The two McLarens were in the bottom six of both practice sessions as the team limited its mileage following recent power unit penalties. With Jenson Button complaining about the handling of the MP4-30 on hard tyres, Alonso says the team is struggling on a number of fronts.

"Well, we are slow," Alonso said. "The tyres are not very grippy, with these compounds we saw a lot of cars going off and it was no different for us. Also we are losing a lot of time on the straights and tried to gain time on the corners, so it’s a difficult situation but as we knew and we try to get the maximum out of the car. We tested a lot on the car today so we just need to analyse everything and put the best parts on tomorrow."

Alonso ran off at Luffield in FP2 in a carbon copy of Romain Grosjean's error which saw the Lotus beached in the gravel. With Alonso managing to rejoin the track he says Grosjean's problem helped ensure his session wasn't over.

Asked how he got out of the gravel when Grosjean didn't, Alonso replied: "Well, because I saw him!

"When I saw him and the type of gravel was very soft, when I lost the car there and went into the gravel I immediately got on the throttle to try and keep the speed up because I knew the gravel would try to slow me down. So thanks to seeing Romain I got lucky!"

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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.