Abandon for Alonso and anonymous race for Vandoorne, a Monaco GP to forget for McLaren

After encouraging qualifications for Fernando Alonso, who started from the 7th position this Sunday, his best position since the beginning of the season, the Spaniard couldn’t finish a race he himself describes as boring due to a gearbox problem: « It was a rather boring race: I was hovering around the seventh place but no yellow flags or safety car came in to help us. I’m obviously disappointed because it’s our first retirement of the year. I first lost power, and then there was a problem with the gearbox. It’s annoying because we had the seventh place in the bag. »

Only source of satisfaction for the Spaniard was the relatively decent pace of his car this weekend: « We were the fourth fastest team this weekend and in the seventh place in the race, which is what we were aiming for. There’s nothing we can do about it, we will have to improve our reliability for the upcoming races. »

The same feeling of powerlessness and disappointment predominates in Stoffel Vandoorne’s remarks, who got lost in the anonymity of the pack: « A really disappointing race for me, the first stint was quite good, I started on Ultra Softs and I wanted to have a long stint before switching to Hyper Softs, but I eventually had too much wear and couldn’t make it. Moreover, I lost time during my first pit stop and therefore positions on the track. »

« My last stint, on Hypersofts, was a bit quicker and I was able to fight with the car in front, but we are in Monaco and it’s not a place where you can overtake. We expect better than this, but I think we have already made some good progress in our qualifying pace. We must now really focus on how to improve the car to be better positioned and score points. » concluded the Belgian.

The chequered flags falls on the 2018 #MonacoGP. Not exactly the race we’d hoped for, but we’ll push forward to Canada. pic.twitter.com/v8Aw0AQSv5

— McLaren (@McLarenF1) 27 mai 2018