McLaren Honda
Fernando Alonso says that the Malaysian Grand Prix weekend was 'better than expected' for McLaren, despite neither he nor team-mate Jenson Button finishing the second round of the campaign.
Alonso was forced out of the race due to an ERS issue on lap 21 but says that his pace during the early stint of the race gave him encouragement.
"This whole weekend has been better than I expected," he said. "The main positive to take away from today is the fact that we were able to run with other cars – Jenson and I weren’t simply fighting with each other. That was the first step we needed to take, and we’ve taken it already.
"Indeed, our race pace was surprisingly good; I was running with the pack, and I was even able to catch the Red Bulls before the pit-stops. That was a nice surprise.
"We still need a little more time to investigate the exact cause of my retirement. The team came over the radio to tell me to back off a little, to save the car, so I brought it back to the pits.
"For us, these are the sort of reliability problems you’d usually discover in pre-season testing, but, given our lack of running over the winter, unfortunately we’re likely to encounter such issues in the first few races of the year."
Button's failure to finish means that neither McLaren was classified at a Grand Prix for the first time since the 2006 United States Grand Prix.
