McLaren and Honda insist that progress is being made

McLaren and Honda insist they’re continuing to make good progress, even if Saturday’s qualifying result for the Chinese GP hardly suggested as much.

On the face of it, with Jenson Button and Fernando Alonso qualifying exactly where they did in Malaysia two weeks ago – 17th and 18th - it appears they’re treading water.

Yet all within the partnership reckon that’s not the case. Speaking on Saturday evening, Alonso described the work they’re doing as “amazing” while Button said there was more to progress than meets the eye.  

“I’m enjoying this process,” Alonso said. “It’s weird to hear that probably but we were 4.5 seconds behind in Australia, we were 3-3.5 in Malaysia, [here] we are 2.5.

“All this process and all the job the team is doing, every week and every race, is amazing.

“We are underperforming; we are not at the level we want and I’m sure we will be very soon. But it’s time to be together with the team and enjoying this experience and this growing up together as a team.”

Button was about 0.9s slower than polesitter Lewis Hamilton in Q1, although he used the faster soft tyres rather than the mediums Mercedes opted for.

“I think from the outside it’s always difficult to know what is happening on the inside,” Button said. “If you look at the times, you’ll say ‘there’s not much progress there, is there?’

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“But when you’re on the inside, first of all we knew that it was not going to be an easy start to the year. But on the inside you feel the difference, you feel the car is developing and also the atmosphere in the team.

“As Fernando said, everybody understand their roles, every man is helping the guy next to him. So there’s a really good atmosphere.

“It is exciting to see the change in performance and the progress that we make. And it’s not like most teams will find this year: it’s not one tenth here and one tenth there. It’s big chunks of time.

“It’s not as bad as you see from the timing screens.”

Any disappointment would have been magnified by the fact that both drivers had, relatively speaking, shown stronger pace during Friday practice.

Button and Alonso were 10th and 12th respectively in P2 – although, according to the former, the gap to the front was “pretty much the same as yesterday. It’s more that the cars we were in front of yesterday have stepped up”.

Alonso’s day got off to a bad start when an engine ignition problem ended his participation in P3 after just two minutes.

And while Button had hoped to make Q2 for the first time this season, he said he “couldn’t find a balance that really worked”.

The Englishman also threw some perspective on the situation McLaren and Honda currently find themselves in when he admitted that the Toro Rossos had been “a lot quicker”.

Honda motorsport boss Yasuhisa Arai said that although they were running their hybrid at full power, improvement was still needed across all the components.  

“Up to yesterday the pace is very good I felt,” he said. “But today is a little bit disappointing – today’s result. But the actual progress is much better day by day.”

“We can’t be happy about being 17th and 18th,” McLaren racing director Eric Boullier added. “As both drivers said, if you look at the positions, obviously there is not much improvement since Australia.

“But if you look at the time difference between the fastest cars and us, there is significant improvement.”