Fernando Alonso expressed encouragement over the consistency of McLaren’s MCL33 in Azerbaijan, and exuded confidence over the gains it has made with its straight-line speed.
McLaren has struggled for straight-line speed in 2018 and moved towards finding a solution at the Baku City Circuit, which has several lengthy full-throttle sections.
Alonso finished seventh in the opening session and moved up to sixth in second practice, just a tenth behind Lewis Hamilton, and within a second of leader Daniel Ricciardo.
In full: Azerbaijan GP FP2 results
“Ours was a comfortable car to drive today – that’s always important on a street circuit, where you have to attack the corners and feel confident in the car,” he said.
“Today, we had a that car performed well in all three sectors, each of which is fairly unique.
“This weekend’s updates were introduced in order to help deal with the circuit’s characteristics, and seem to be working as we expected.
“It feels like we’ve found a little bit of speed compared to the last few races, so I’m fairly happy, as we weren’t compromised in either the corners or the slow speed sector.
“I was also a little lucky on my fast lap, running behind Nico [Hulkenberg] as he began his quick-lap, so I gained a couple of tenths in the final sector.
“It’s going to be as tough as ever to make it into Q3 tomorrow, but this is actually one of those races where you don’t really know if starting ninth or 10th is actually better than starting 11th or 12th, and getting a free choice of fresh tyre.”
Stoffel Vandoorne finished down in 19th position, but played down his lack of pace, pointing to traffic and an error through Turn 7 on his hot lap.
“There’s a lot of learning still to be done, and a lot of improvements still to be made, but I think the progress we made today shows we are headed in the right direction,” he said.
“From my side, it feels much better than it looks on the time-sheets. We didn’t get a proper run on the Ultrasoft tyre, encountering some traffic, and I had a little brush against the wall so I wasn’t able to improve over the time I set on the Supersoft.”
