Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsMcLaren

'We are not competitive at all' - Alonso

Fernando Alonso says McLaren is "not competitive at all" and rules out scoring points at the Belgian Grand Prix.

McLaren has received an upgraded power unit from Honda for this weekend's race at Spa-Francorchamps, and has taken a number of new components to ensure it has a bigger pool to make use of in the coming races. The result is a combined grid penalty of 105 places, meaning both cars will start at the back of the grid.

When asked if McLaren has the pace in the car to try to score a point on Sunday, Alonso replied: “I need many things to happen tomorrow!

"I talked before about the rain, but we probably need more than the rain. we need a very chaotic race, but I think the target tomorrow cannot be the points to be honest. We have to be realistic, we are not competitive at all and the target tomorrow is to learn about the car and keep putting on mileage.”

And Alonso says McLaren knew it would be uncompetitive at Spa and took the grid penalties as a result.

“Well I think we are facing different issues during the weekend. The biggest one is the lack of speed we have. We are not very competitive, we knew that. It’s the longest circuit of the championship with very long straights, so it’s not a circuit that is favourable to our car.

"For that we decided to strategically pay some penalties here because we knew that we have very little chance. That’s the biggest problem, the other issues are relatively minor compared to that one.”

Click here for Saturday's Belgian Grand Prix gallery at Spa-Francorchamps

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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.