Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsMcLaren

Alonso surprised by McLaren race pace

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Fernando Alonso says McLaren’s pace was “surprisingly good” before he was forced to retire from the Malaysian Grand Prix.

Following such a difficult opening weekend in Australia, McLaren made a clear step forward in Malaysia and Alonso was running competitively in the midfield when the team told him to retire the car due to an ERS cooling issue. Having said on Saturday McLaren would be able to fight with some of the teams near the back of the pack, he was still surprised to be so competitive in the race.

“The pace was surprisingly good, we were running with the pack and even catching the Red Bulls at the end before the pit stops,” Alonso said. “It was a nice surprise and hopefully in China we can make another step forward.

“These reliability problems are normal and without winter testing, what you normally find in winter testing we have to find in the first couple of races unfortunately. But we need to accept maybe some retirements and we are ready to do so.

“Definitely it has been a very nice weekend and a very nice surprise to see the improvement from Australia to here. If we keep this rate we will enjoy [success] very soon.”

And Alonso believes scoring a point would not have been out of the question, with the two Red Bull cars finishing ninth and tenth.

"We were out of sync with some pit stops with the others, but maybe tenth with one point was possible. The real positive thing is that we were able to run with everyone else and we were not the last two cars fighting with each other. This is the first step we had to do and it’s good that we’ve made it already."

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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.