Alonso upbeat after 'very, very good performance'

While 12th place on the grid for the Canadian Grand Prix is never going to be one of Fernando Alonso's career, the two-time world champion was sounding surprisingly upbeat after today's qualifying session.

Alonso explained that he was happy to have been able to get the most out of the McLaren at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve. After a frustrating Friday in which he suffered a loss of hydraulic pressure in FP1, it had been a problem-free time on Saturday.

"I think the lap was good, the lap was clean. I did the maximum, so I'm happy with the performance at the end," he said.

"Obviously P12 is not the ideal position to start. But with the deficit we have here on power, we know how much it is in terms of timed laps."

Alonso's best lap of qualifying was in Q1 when he recorded a time of 1:13.669s which put him tenth fastest. He posted an almost identical second round with a time of 1:13.693s, confirming his consistency.

"I think being 1.2s from Hamilton in Q2, that's definitely a very, very good performance for us and extremely happy."

Record-setting lap puts Hamilton on pole in Canada

This time it was only good enough for 12th place in the round. It meant he failed to progress to the pole shoot-out. Asked what he could do from that position on the grid in tomorrow's race, Alonso admitted he would be up against it.

"Hopefully we do a good start, I've got a good strategy," he said. "There's not much you can do apart from try and have a good exit from turn ten and try to defend.

"But there are things you cannot defend because they will be side by side in the middle in the straight.

"There are a few doubts for tomorrow," he admitted. "Not just the power but also the fuel consumption will be very very high.

"We have some problems to solve, but nothing we can do," he shrugged.

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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.