MONTMELO, Spain — Despite a series of reliability issues during pre-season testing, Fernando Alonso insists his McLaren could go racing tomorrow if it needed to.
McLaren has completed the least amount of laps of any team over the six days of testing and has suffered on-track breakdowns during four of them. There are just two days of testing left — and only one day in the car for Alonso — but the two-time world champion is not concerned.
« In terms of the fundamental answers we needed to gather over the winter test, they are already OK and we have all of them — so I don’t need the last day to be honest, » Alonso said. « I will be in the car, I will drive and hopefully we will keep discovering new things on the car, but if Australia was tomorrow it’s OK. »
Alonso said he had experienced similar issues on cars in the past but without the media attention McLaren has received this week.
« I think this is more or less normal in every new car, » he added. « I am 18 years in [to my F1 career] and in winter testing I keep discovering things every year. It is the same not only in winter testing but before when testing was free we would test in between races like before Monaco and Canada — going to Paul Ricard and doing 20 laps a day and there was no coverage.
« Now I understand we have hundreds of media so every red flag attracts a lot of attention but from a team point of view we are more or less OK and there is nothing fundamentally a problem with the car.
« The issues we had are well under control but unfortunately we keep discovering small things every day. That is putting us in a strong position for Australia in the way we can enforce these small issues. As I said before, it is better it happens here than in two weeks’ time. »
http://www.espn.com/f1/story/_/id/22679271/alonso-mclaren-ready-australian-gp-now
