BARCELONA, Spain -- Fernando Alonso was disappointed to complete just 29 laps in his first day of testing in the new McLaren MCL32, but said it would be unfair to assume the team is heading for a repeat of the last two years.
Since McLaren partnered with Honda in 2015, the team has made a slow start to testing with power unit reliability issues. 2016 represented significant progress over 2015, but on the first day of testing on Monday an oil system issue forced the team to replace its Honda power unit after just one lap, resulting in the team losing out on several hours of testing.
"I think it's not the perfect start for the winter testing, but, at the same time, it's easy and unfair to say that after the difficulties we had in the past two years, it's a nice temptation for you guys to maximise today's problems, because it's quite interesting for the media point of view -- after two difficult season, that we arrive at winter testing and do not run in the first day, unfortunately.
"But from the performance point of view, and the team's point of view, we have to concentrate and try to recover the lost time. We are disappointed, we are sad to be unable to run in the first day of testing, we are aware of the time we lost today -- we have four days of running for each driver before the championship starts and now one day is gone.
"I have three days to prepare a World Championship - it's not and ideal situation, but it's the way it is and, as I said, there's nothing more we can do from today, all we can do is learn from whatever happened to the car and try to recover in the next days."
Asked specifically about the performance of the Honda engine, he added: "I would prefer not to say anything today! We had some issues, we were running at the end with very conservative settings, just to slowly pick up the pace and check if all the systems were working.
"I think, at the moment, we are not able to comment anything on the power unit, because we were not running it at the spec that should be on the car. Let's wait and see, hopefully Honda can find quickly the solutions for this week and have more normal days this week, for Stoffel and myself.
"And then, next week, to have something better and hopefully similar to what we'll have in Australia, because right now it's difficult to comment on the first day because we had so many issues."
Earlier in the day, McLaren racing director Eric Boullier said Honda was working closely with its engineers back in Japan to understand the issue.
"Well I think they reacted as professionally as you would expect," he said. "They were disappointed obviously and rather than driving everyone nuts around, they sat down, organised calls with Sakura in Japan but also we had some meeting together with us.
"To just start helping an investigation but also to decide what to do, so this is why we decided altogether to take this old PU off the car to let's say rule out any suspicious thing on the car. So we take everything out, bring everything back for another PU to try to run as soon as possible. Everything that has been done has been coordinated with Sakura and Woking."