YAS MARINA, Abu Dhabi -- Fernando Alonso is certain McLaren can finish the season with some points after it took "a few risks" on set-up and made Q3 in Abu Dhabi.
Since arriving at Yas Marina, Alonso has downplayed McLaren's expectations and said after Friday practice a Q3 appearance looked unlikely. However, the Spaniard progressed to the top ten shootout and will line up in ninth position for the final race of the year, where he thinks he can keep the No. 7 car in the points.
Speaking about McLaren's improvement from Friday practice, he said: "The car was already going better in FP3, as we did a few changes overnight that improved it, but it was important to do a perfect lap, because here's there's a lot of room for mistake. There's a lot of heavy braking where it's easy to lock a front wheel, so to get a good lap when the track is at its best was a challenge.
"We managed to do it, we'll start 9th and then tomorrow we'll try to do a good race and collect points. How many, will depend of what happens ahead of us. As I always say the top six are running in a different category, they're far in front of the rest of the field, but this time even Force India is too far in front of us, in no man's land, so not as close to us as in previous occasions.
"If nothing happens ahead of us it will be complicated to do better than this, but we'll certainly try."
With McLaren out of the top ten in both Friday sessions, Alonso admits the team made some brave decisions overnight to try and maximise the final qualifying result of 2016.
"Obviously track conditions changed for everybody, from day to night, but we had to analyse well the situation, take a few risks with the set-up and understand how the track was going to evolve from what we had learned from FP1 to FP2.
"We made a few changes without having too many certainties, we put more front wing on, we changed the suspension settings, to anticipate the expected track conditions' changes. It was a mix of a bit of luck and taking the right risks."