Fernando Alonso says qualifying 13th for the Australian Grand Prix is "nothing to celebrate" for McLaren and insists taking points in Sunday's race is not good enough for the team.
McLaren was expected to struggle at the season-opener following a disastrous pre-season littered by reliability issues, however, Alonso comfortably made it into Q2 and ultimately qualified 13th in Melbourne. While he said the team's qualifying performance had positives, the Spaniard admits a place on the sixth row of the grid is not what he wanted.
"I think we came here with no clear picture of where we were and the worst case scenario was that we were very uncompetitive and reliability was a big issue in testing," Alonso explained. "More or less we've run all the sessions trouble-free, now in qualifying we are 13th. It's positive [considering] the bad prognosis that we had but it's definitely not enough.
"We don't come here just to finish 13th. 13th is not our aim or our target. It's nothing to celebrate. I don't care too much. If there are one or two points, it's OK but it will not change my life."
The team struggled for mileage during winter testing and although Alonso is pleasantly surprised by a less-troubled weekend so far, he says reliability concerns remain a worry for McLaren.
"I think there are concerns. I think definitely the reliability, as I said in Barcelona, is one of our biggest issues and we reinforced some of the parts and they kept breaking but I think we still not have 100 percent knowledge of everything that is happening to the cars so it's still early days. For us it's like winter testing now, the race is tomorrow and hopefully we can finish and extract some points hopefully."
When asked if he was hoping for rain to play a part on Sunday, the two-time world champion replied: "Yeah definitely. We are un-competitive, we are not quick enough to battle for the big positions so we need help from the others, we need help from rain, we need help from god, we need everything. So that's not good. Let's work hard and improve the situation in a very short time."