McLaren in a 'strong position' - Alonso

Fernando Alonso says McLaren are in a "strong position" to succeed at the Australian Grand Prix, despite running into reliability issues in pre-season. The Barcelona test has seen McLaren once again suffer through mechanical woes, starting the second event with four breakdowns in two days.

Stoffel Vandoorne suffered three issues on Tuesday before an oil leak robbed Alonso of more than six hours of track time on day two of the second test.

A wheel-nut failure dumped Alonso into the gravel in the first hour of the first test, with a switch from Honda to Renault power units failing to lift the gloom in the team.

But the messages out of McLaren remain positive, and Alonso echoed his sporting director Eric Boullier, explaining that he is happy to discover minor issues on the car before travelling to Albert Park.

"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.

"I think this is more or less normal in every new car.

"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."