HUNGARORING -- Fernando Alonso says he is growing irritated by having to repeat himself about the fact he will decide on his Formula One future after the summer break.
Alonso is out of contract at the end of the season but has consistently reiterated that he will make no decision on his next move until September at the earliest. The Spaniard even made that clear when he missed the Monaco Grand Prix to contest the Indy 500 at the end of May, a decision motivated by Honda delivering McLaren an uncompetitive and unreliable engine for the third year in a row.
McLaren increasingly looks like Alonso's only logical option for next year but the Spaniard was in no mood to dwell on 2018 when asked about it after Friday practice in Budapest.
"I have nothing to say about my future - I say this every weekend and whatever interview you read about it is something they picked up from a few weeks ago, a replay of something that was published before.
"If I was a reader, and every week I'd read Alonso will wait until September to decide his future, I'd think that was too much," he said. "It makes it look like I grab a microphone every week or any person in the paddock just to say 'I'm not saying anything until September!' It's all copy and paste, so I'm not going to repeat myself."
McLaren is expecting Hungary to be its most competitive weekend of the season so far due to the fact pace at the Budapest circuit is not too heavily dictated by engine power. Alonso finished an encouraging eighth in FP2, something he hopes the team can build on in qualifying.
"It's difficult to get a clear picture on Fridays but we ended up more or less where we expected to be, behind the three top teams, so hopefully we'll find a bit more speed for tomorrow. All in all we were more competitive in FP1 than in FP2, so we have to understand why that happened, if we made some set-up change that went in the wrong direction. We'll investigate now and will try to be more competitive tomorrow. What's missing is what's always been missing - a bit more speed..."