Fernando Alonso says McLaren will slip back on Saturday compared to its Friday practice performance at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.
While FP1 took place in unrepresentative conditions due to the race starting at sunset, the second practice session saw Alonso finish with the ninth quickest time. However, Alonso says the position is not a true reflection of where McLaren will be in qualifying on Saturday evening.
“I think it was a normal Friday for us and this P9 is not for real, as tomorrow we should be further back, as usual," Alonso said. "I hope we’re a bit more competitive than usual, but today was already a good day. We worked on the tyres, but we put the super softs at the right moment and that helped the performance."
And Alonso says McLaren was also carrying out work for 2016 which will require thorough analysis, even if the lap time suggests it was positive.
"The most important thing of the day was that we had a lot of things to do, a lot of new things to try, and everything went more or less well. Now we have to analyse what we can keep for the rest of the weekend and from the ones we cannot keep in the car for Saturday and Sunday we need to evaluate the data to see if we keep them for next year. So, there’s a lot of data analysis to do overnight.
"I cannot say how the new parts work, because some of the data analysis will take weeks. I’ve actually asked the engineers how did the new parts work and they gave me that answer. We did a lot of laps with extreme settings, so we have to analyse the data but it was much better than in Brazil, where we had to park the car early because of some issues. Every lap you do you learn something, so let’s hope it was a useful day."
AS IT HAPPENED: Abu Dhabi Grand Prix FP2
Eric Silbermann's Abu Dhabi grumpy preview
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