Fernando Alonso fears tough race after power unit change

Fernando Alonso says he is braced for a tougher-than-expected Bahrain Grand Prix after McLaren was forced to change the power unit in his MCL32 following another reliability issue during qualifying.

Alonso suffered an MGU-H failure during Q2 and he was unable to complete a flying lap, leaving him down in 15th position.

Honda is still investigating the cause of the failure, with the manufacturer also evaluating whether it was related to the MGU-H issue which halted Stoffel Vandoorne during practice.

“I think until the last corner [my lap] was half a second better than my Q1 time, then I went on the throttle and there was an issue in the power unit,” said Alonso.

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“That hurt, because we had a chance of being a couple of places up, and tomorrow we’ll have to fit a new power unit, which won’t have the perfect settings or calibration.

“The first lap the engine gets will be the formation lap, so it won’t get any warm-up, we won’t get any laps to tune it, and we’ll probably therefore have an even tougher race than we’d expected. 

“The guys in the garage work day and night to prepare the car, there are parts we keep changing, we keep testing the updates, there’s hard work behind every weekend, but we don’t have a competitive power unit to fight at the front.”

Team-mate Stoffel Vandoorne was eliminated in Q1 and will start from 17th place on the grid.

“Everything was more or less OK with my laps,” said the Belgian youngster.

“I struggled a little bit with the brakes on the second run and had a couple of lock-ups, so I was lacking a little bit of confidence.

“But I think the lap was more or less the maximum possible – I don’t think there was much more left in the car.

“Our results are more or less the same as they have been during the past couple of races, so I don’t think we expected anything different here this weekend.”