Fernando Alonso continued his streak of points scoring finishes this season as he finished eighth at the Spanish Grand Prix – his home race.
Alonso is one of just three drivers to have scored in every race of the 2018 season so far, with championship leaders Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel the other two.
Speaking after the race, Alonso says he thought points would have been "impossible" after he dropped down the order at the start of the race when he had to run wide to avoid the spinning Romain Grosjean.
"We lost positions on the first lap with the incident at Turn 2, so we found ourselves in a very difficult position in lap two and then I felt it was impossible to get the points today.
"But luckily we had a good race, we keep scoring points, five consecutive races in the points. That’s what we wanted today and I am happy right now."
The Spaniard is now 'best of the rest' in the standings in seventh and is hopeful of remaining there with McLaren's latest upgrades closing the gap to rivals Renault and Haas.
"We knew that the upgrades would put us in a better position in the midfield pack," he said. "I think we caught up a little bit with Renault and Haas as well but the top three teams keep developing the car at the same rate that we do and keep that gap unfortunately.
"We did a good step here. We were 0.8s behind Renault in Baku, 0.9s behind them in China and here we were the same in qualifying and the race. We did a step forward but we know its going to be a big battle until the end and its important to score points.
"We still lack some straight line speed to be able to overtake so it’s something that we are working on. We know our weakness on the car and hopefully we will find some solutions soon."
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