MP4-30 passes 50-lap mark for the first time this winter
Monday 16 March 2015 14:28, UK
Fernando Alonso has reaffirmed his belief that McLaren-Honda will be a winning partnership after “a beautiful day” in the car at the Circuit de Catalunya.
The Spaniard completed 59 laps in the Barcelona sun as the Woking team bounced back from another early finish on Thursday with their most promising day of testing to date.
“I am excited about this project. I went to Japan last week and saw the facilities and the resources – I don’t know how long it is going to take, but we will win,” Alonso confidently predicted. "We have all the ingredients to do it.
“It has been a beautiful day for me driving the car and exploring some of the potential. Obviously we are running with some limitations still with the engine and the power, but definitely the car felt better than at Jerez. There is a little thing with the brake balance we need to fix, gearshift to improve, there is a temperature that goes too high, too low, but it is a learning process.
“We are half way through the testing, there are still six more days to go and we need to make some progress, because while we are happy with today our 60 laps, it is still the lowest number of all the teams today. There is still a long way to go, but we are making progress.”
Indeed such was the improvement from McLaren that racing director Eric Boullier admitted the team had surpassed their own expectations for the day as the MP4-30 showed some semblance of reliability.
“It is good to finally put some laps on the board and get the programme back over the boundary – we have actually done more things today then we were expecting,” the Frenchman said.
“So we are catching up on our programme. I am happy with what we are doing, we are not looking for performance as we have a long list of system checks.
“Our aero plan has been done today in full and we have been doing some set up work on the car for the first time to understand how the car is reacting and so far so good.”
If McLaren continue to make progress during the remaining two days in Barcelona this week a raft of performance upgrades will be brought to the car for the third and final test, and even a race simulation isn’t being ruled out.
“The car is still in its launch configuration. We couldn’t do enough miles now to justify bringing upgrades, so next week will be another step and Australia will see another big step,” Boullier added.
“We still have one more test to go and I think it is a little bit too soon to go into a race simulation. Maybe next week in one of the late afternoons if we see the potential we could put it in the plan, but we have so many system checks that we want to do before and tick the boxes, but the race simulation is the plan if we can do the other ones first.”
