After a rather trouble free third free practice session where air temperatures peaked at 35 degrees and track temperatures at 40, McLaren driver Fernando Alonso completed ten lap and set the twelfth fastest time as he completed runs on alternate set-up configurations and practiced pitstops mid-session.
Unfortunately, qualifying didn't go so well for the Spaniard.
After securing 15th place in Q1, allowing him to go through into Q2, an MGU-H issue on his flying lap meant he was unable to set a time during the second session, meaning he will start Sunday nights race from 5th place on the grid.
“Unfortunately, my lap in Q2 was good. I think until the last corner it was half a second better than my Q1 time, then I went on the throttle and there was an issue in the power unit,” Fernando explained. “That hurt, because we had a chance of being a couple of places up, and tomorrow we'll have to fit a new power unit, which won't have the perfect settings or calibration.”
“The first lap the engine gets will be the formation lap, so it won't get any warm-up, we won't get any laps to tune it, and we'll probably therefore have an even tougher race than we'd expected. The guys in the garage work day and night to prepare the car, there are parts we keep changing, we keep testing the updates, there's hard work behind every weekend, but we don't have a competitive power unit to fight at the front. It's not the ideal situation, but there's nothing we can do just now, so we'll see tomorrow what we can do.”
