McLaren still playing catch-up after pre-season issues

McLaren's pre-season reliability issues hampered them at the season-opening Australian Grand Prix, but the team are confident that they will soon improve upon their showing in Melbourne. Fernando Alonso and Stoffel Vandoorne finished fifth and ninth respectively, but were without several planned upgrades.

McLaren ranked bottom of the mileage charts in Barcelona across a fortnight of pre-season testing, with both Alonso and Vandoorne grinding to a halt at the Circuit de Catalunya at various points.

Although neither could make it into Q3 at Albert Park, the double DNF at Haas and some good fortune under the Virtual Safety car helped them accrue as many points from one race as they did in 14 last year.

Having now hopefully left their reliability issues behind them, McLaren hope they can now turn attention to improving performance as they chase down Formula 1s three leading teams.

"We were obviously not prepared for Barcelona and I'm glad we fixed the reliability issues for the weekend," sporting director Eric Boullier told Motorsport.

"But during the last few weeks [before the race] we spent our energy fixing the reliability issues and not bringing the upgrade faster to the track.

"So we are going to have another batch coming in Bahrain, which should have been in Australia."

Alonso said before the race that the Melbourne weekend would be McLaren's low point of the season and Boullier also hopes that things will pick up almost immediately.

"Clearly we have to work on these kinds of characteristics, so there will be some fixes I hope in the course of the next few races," said Boullier.

"But we are happy with the correlation [of simulation tools to on-track performance], so we have not lost what was one of the strengths of McLaren last year.

"That's one of the reasons I guess why Fernando was supportive and happy this weekend, because we have lots of things coming that have been signed off already.

"We are now going to push to make sure we can bring things as soon as possible."