F1 | McLaren, Alonso: “We lost time in the first free practice, but the performance is positive”

Positive day for McLaren at the Albert Park track. Despite some small problems during the morning, in fact, Stoffel Vandoorne and Fernando Alonso completed the entire work program scheduled for today, showcasing an extremely interesting step. Haas seems to be the best placed team after Red Bull, Mercedes and Ferrari, but the performances shown in free practice 2 place McLaren in an absolutely positive position. The objective will be to complete a good qualifying, making the most of the opportunities that will arise in front of the drivers during Sunday's race.

Here are the words of Fernando Alonso: "It's a great feeling to be back riding on a race weekend. The climate is totally different compared to the tests and it's wonderful to be back racing together with all your colleagues with people in the stands. Being the first real working day of the season, we tested some innovations studied in recent weeks. However, tomorrow we will have completely different conditions, which is why it will be important to pay particular attention to the data collected today.

"We lost some time in the first free practice due to some problems, but we managed to make up for everything in the afternoon session. Now we will analyze the data and try to put together the best possible package for tomorrow. Time will be a key factor and we want to maximize the opportunities we will find before us" he added.

Here are Stoffel Vandoorne's impressions: “Today was a beautiful day. We lost a little bit of time in the first 45 minutes of FP1, but after that I did a good job and learned a lot about the car. This was the most important thing after the winter tests. The problems we had were not worrisome and we resolved everything fairly quickly.

“We had a very productive day, so I'm looking forward to putting all the pieces together for tomorrow. We are in a fairly reasonable condition and the feeling I have in the car is positive. Everything is working the way we want it to and we just have to keep pushing to achieve the performance we set ourselves. Tomorrow the group will be very small and it will be important to be awake. The track will presumably be wet, which is why we will have to pay particular attention" he concluded.

Roberto Valenti