MELBOURNE, Australia -- McLaren's engine supplier Honda is confident it has introduced successful fixes to the reliability issues it experienced during testing, but admits a performance upgrade is still some way off.
Fernando Alonso qualified 13th in the McLaren-Honda at the season's opening qualifying session, but teammate Stoffel Vandoorne had to settle for 18th after experiencing a fuel flow issue during Q1. The result represents a step forward from pre-season testing, where the team struggled with reoccurring reliability issues, but is still short of the team's ultimate targets of challenging for wins.
"The problem that we had in the testing, every single reason [for the problems] we tried to modify the engine, but from the performance point of view we are still struggling to extract more power from the engine," Honda boss Yusuke Hasegawa said.