McLaren ‘struck the maximum’ with P17 - Alonso

Fernando Alonso says 17th place on the grid at the British Grand Prix is still a good result for McLaren because the team “struck the maximum” in qualifying.

Both McLaren drivers dropped out in Q1, with Alonso outqualifying team-mate Jenson Button as the pair will start from the penultimate row. Alonso’s car was being worked on until the final moments before qualifying but he says the issue was resolved to allow him to get the most out of the car at Silverstone.

“We had an ERS problem this morning and then we found the solution and we could run in qualifying perfectly OK,” Alonso said. “Very few laps today, so you go in to qualifying not knowing the conditions exactly, but I think we struck the maximum; a couple of tenths in front of Jenson we could not be much quicker than that.”

When it was put to Alonso that his comments aren't good to hear a Q1 exit is the maximum, he replied: “Yeah, but that’s the way it is.

“It’s going to be like this. In Hungary it will be like this, in Belgium it will be worse probably, in Monza it will be worse. This is how it is at the moment. It sounds strange but this is the best qualifying of the year for us, being only 1.5s off the leader with the same tyres - the new mediums that Ferrari put on as well - on the second longest circuit on the calendar. So I think in total time we are closer to the top.”

And Alonso says McLaren still has to understand the reasons behind his reliability issues earlier in the day.

“There’s still investigation going on because in the end we put the same ERS pack back in again and everything started working. So there is not a clear answer why after the reset it is OK now.”