McLaren drivers Fernando Alonso and Stoffel Vandoorne have accepted the team fell short of their expectations in qualifying for the Bahrain Grand Prix.
After hovering around the top 10 through all three practice sessions, there was a sense of optimism within the team that both cars could make the final part of qualifying, however, it failed to materialise, as Alonso and Vandoorne ended their evening 13th and 14th respectively.
"Today wasn’t great," Alonso said. "Our qualifying performance was worse than we expected. It was okay in free practice, but then in qualifying we lost speed and we were struggling from Q1.
"Our one-lap performance is not yet optimised – we cannot extract the maximum from the tyres over one lap, and we need to find the reasons why.
"Our race pace has been better than our pace over a single lap so far, and yesterday during the long runs on old tyres we felt quite competitive.
"This morning, too, on a hot track the car felt good and we seem to take good care of the rear tyres, which is going to be an advantage in the race. But, obviously our starting position is compromised already and we are quite far back, so we’ll see what we can do."
Vandoorne believes if the team can be bold and utilise the right strategy in the race, thanks to their ability to have free choice in their starting tyres, both he and Alonso can be prepared to pounce on any opportunities which could fall their way.
"We all expected a bit more from today," added Vandoorne. "We had good sessions yesterday in FP1 and FP2 and I was feeling very confident in the car. We know we’re in this very compact midfield where every tenth is very important for us and makes all the difference, so we need to keep improving.
"We didn’t make the step forward that we needed to today, so we need to keep pushing and there’s a lot of work to do. But, I think we can race tomorrow. We had good pace during the long runs on Friday and the balance was pretty good.
"This is a circuit where strategy and tyres are quite complex, so there are some possibilities. We need to be opportunistic and, like in Melbourne, try to benefit from other people’s mistakes.
"We have a free choice of tyres tomorrow, and I think around here it could be quite interesting. Tyre degradation has been key at this track in the past and there are a number of different strategies possible. We’ve seen some good races here and that’s what we’re going after tomorrow."
