Alonso back in the running as strong race shows Mclaren have rediscovered their mojo
For three years, Mclaren’s Fernando Alonso could only dreamofhavingacarreliable enough to compete with the top teams in Formula 1. Or at least finish races.
In the first race of the new F1 season, Alonso showed that his team now has new fight since switching from its Honda-made engines to ones made by Renault as he took fifth place with a strong performance at the Australian Grand Prix, while his team-mate, Stoffel Vandoorne, finished ninth.
“The last couple of years have been difficult and I think the winter has been difficult, as well,” Alonso said, referring to technical mishaps in off-season testing that limited Mclaren to the fewest laps of the ten teams running at the Circuit de Barcelona-catalunya.
“And now we’ve come here and both cars have scored points – one in the top five. We should be proud of that, but I think there’s a lot more to come from Mclaren.” After
several years marked by technical issues and race retirements – Alonso failed to finish 17 races over three seasons – the team’s fortunes are starting to look up.
After starting tenth on the grid, Alonso fought hard against Red Bull and Renault for much of yesterday’s race, managing to hold off numerous pass attempts by talented 20-year-old Max Verstappen of Red Bull towards the end to secure fifth place. This matched his best finish of the past three seasons.
Mclaren also benefitted from the dual retirement of the Haas cars, but Alonso sent notice to his competitors–and-his-own-team–that more should be expected of the once-proud Mclaren team this season.
After qualifying on Saturday, he promised that Mclaren would score “big points” this weekend, and at one point during the race, he even barked at his own race engineer, “Speak up a little bit, it is a long race and you are losing the energy already.” Now Alonso has set his sights on challenging Red Bull this season, a team that had been in a different league from Mclaren in recent years. “This is only our first race together with Renault and some updates will come in the next few races,” he said. “We can start to look ahead and Red Bull will be the next target.”
Mclaren racing director Eric Boullier added: “We’re encouraged by the potential our car has shown, but also, reliability-wise, we had a trouble-free weekend, which is a relief after the issues we had in winter testing.”