Despite another stop-start day, Fernando Alonso insisted that he is not overly bothered by the McLaren F1 Team‘s testing problems.
After two electrical failures hampered the first day of the second test yesterday for his team-mate Stoffel Vandoorne, Alonso saw his track time slashed by an unwanted oil leak on the second day. McLaren managed to get him back out for the afternoon, but the Spaniard only managed 54 laps all day – clocking the sixth fastest time, a 1:19.856 on hyper-softs, nearly two seconds away of Aston Martin Red Bull Racing Daniel Ricciardo‘s benchmark time on the same compound.
Alonso looked at the positives of testing failures, seeing it as a valuable learning process.
“Of course, the programme we had planned today was longer than 50-something laps,” said Alonso.
“But Stoffel and I faced a couple of issues over the last couple of days and this is part of testing – hopefully now these things won’t happen on lap 10 in Melbourne.
“In a way, it’s useful learning and I’m happy that we’re continuing to make the car stronger and stronger.
“We managed to complete all the important parts of the programme this morning, so the rest of the day was more about long runs and putting in extra mileage, without needing any specific information to send back to the factory. “
The 36-year-old is scheduled for just one more day in the car before the season-opening Australian Grand Prix, but appeared rather blasé about the matter, saying that he’d be ready to go to Australia tomorrow.
“I’m not worried about the track time we lost today,” he added.
“I have one more day in the car before Australia, and I hope we’ll be able to do some long runs and check extra things in order to keep discovering more about our new package, but the fundamental questions we needed to answer in winter testing have been answered, so for me the final day is not crucial.
“If we went to Australia tomorrow, I’d feel okay.”
