Despite missing out on Q3 for a second successive race, Fernando Alonso believes the upgrades McLaren is bringing to its car are improving it as expected.
Both Alonso and teammate Stoffel Vandoorne failed to make the top ten shootout in Bahrain and will start tomorrow's race from 13th and 14th. To make matters worse for the Woking squad, it was well-beaten by former engine supplier Honda as Pierre Gasly qualified sixth in the Toro Rosso.
The Spaniard is sure McLaren's upgrades are improving the performance of the MCL33 and says the team's struggles are more track specific rather than the upgrades not working.
"No I think they work as expected so I think the improvements are there and the car felt better than Australia. I think the nature of the circuit is far from ideal for our car. We came here looking at last year's performance and it was not great here, it was one of the worst performance for us last year and unfortunately we saw today again it is a circuit that we don't have into our hands yet in terms of approach or setup or whatever. That was something that we need to analysing but the new parts of the car work fine."
Alonso expects to perform better in race conditions, but admits McLaren may have focused too heavily on race setup rather than one-lap performance.
"I think this circuit anyway requires a different setup concept for quali and for race distance because here the rear degradation is huge and with this kind of circuit, stop and go, heavy tractions, corners and things like that, you need a very strong rear end.
"If you have a very strong rear end, then in quali, you are struggling a little bit to rotate the car in the hairpins with the front end missing so maybe we setup the car a little bit too much towards the race but it's not an excuse. We didn't perform today and hopefully tomorrow we can see a little bit more performance.''