SHANGHAI, China -- Fernando Alonso has denied suggestions he will leave McLaren this year, saying he is still motivated to outperform his car at every round of the championship regardless of where it stacks up against the competition.
Honda's performance deficit to its rival engine manufacturers has left McLaren off the pace for the third season in a row this year, with Alonso saying that the MCL32 was the slowest car on the grid at the opening race in Australia. He managed to drag the car up to tenth place in Melbourne before a brake duct came loose and damaged aero elements on one side of the car, seriously affecting its handling and forcing him to retire.
After the race speculation resurfaced that he will lose patience with McLaren and quit before the end of the year -- including comments from former F1 driver Mark Webber -- but Alonso insists that will not the case.
"No, definitely not true," he said. "It's normal from the outside that drivers speak and I have read comments from many people. In Spain also, if one ex-driver or motorbike rider speaks to the media they have one question that is also about Alonso. 'How do they see the situation?' And everyone seems to be quite close to me and I have a depression! But it's not like that.
"In Formula One I am delivering at my best, I'm more prepared than ever and I perform at my best. The team is not very competitive now, OK that's true and there is not much we can do from one day to another, it's hard work. At the same time, I think that the team is expecting an extra job from me now, an extra result, as we did in Australia where the predictions and simulations said we were last and we were tenth. In China, if the prediction says we are last, hopefully Alonso is in the points."
Alonso is expecting China to be a tough race for McLaren and says he currently needs to "drive around" the problems of the Honda engine.
"In Australia it was a record for us with fuel saving, so it's going to be difficult this year as long as the engine doesn't improve. It's not power, it's many things -- it's reliability, it's fuel saving and there are a lot more implications on the driving that we cannot drive normally because we need to drive around the engine. It's quite difficult and hard now to drive the car, but we are doing our best to help the team.
"We need to be ready for a difficult and tough race. It's difficult to predict because there are some races where you have a lot of expectations on Sunday and you don't deliver and there is the opposite when they look difficult on paper but everything goes well. So let's wait and see. I don't think we are lacking deployment compared to the opposition, it's just we have less power and our time on the straights is much longer than the rest."