Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsMcLaren

Alonso will set targets after opening races

Fernando Alonso says McLaren will wait until the second or third race of the season before setting targets for 2015.

The new McLaren-Honda partnership got off to a difficult start at the first pre-season test, with power unit issues limiting the team to just 79 laps. With the new partnership with Honda proving such a big challenge, Alonso says McLaren will not be able to set itself any targets until it has seen its competitiveness over the opening few races.

"We need to see how competitive we are," Alonso said. "We just did one test [at Jerez], and we were not running with the full potential of the car. We were just testing the first days of the car.

"I think once we have the full potential, once we are in the second or third race and we see how fast we are, we'll put a target for this first year.

"We want to win the championship. We don't know if it will be the first year, the second or the third – hopefully as soon as possible - but this is something that we want to achieve.“

The final two pre-season tests take place at the Circuit de Catalunya from February 19-22 and February 26-March 1, with the first race in Melbourne on March 15.

Click here for the full final day gallery from the Jerez test

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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.