Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsMcLaren

McLaren will slip back, warns Alonso

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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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.