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McLaren failed to exploit full potential

McLaren racing director Eric Boullier says the team has failed to exploit its full potential so far during the German Grand Prix weekend.

For the first time in four races, neither McLaren driver made it through to Q3 on Saturday as Jenson Button dropped out in 12th place and Fernando Alonso in 14th. While Hockenheim features more straights than the Hungaroring a week ago, Boullier says there was more performance in the car than McLaren managed to show in qualifying.

"We couldn’t find the right balance so we have struggled all weekend so far and I think a couple of tenths here is worth four or five positions," Boullier said. "We couldn’t do a proper lap and exploit all the full potential of the car."

Alonso believes Hockenheim also saw rival teams make a bigger step in Q2 when turning their power units up to full power due to the nature of the track.

"We know that in qualifying some of our opponents turn their engines up a little bit and we lose performance compared to practice but, compared to one week ago, we are definitely less competitive," Alonso said.

"I think the track is not the best for our package and we know that when the people turned the engine up in Budapest it was one or two tenths, where here it is a bit more because of the straights so we lose a bit of performance there.

"But we didn’t have a clean lap [in qualifying] and I also had mistakes in all my laps apart from the first one in Q1, so I think there is more pace to come in the race and hopefully we can have good strategy, a good start, and go back to the top ten and get some points."

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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.