McLaren's Fernando Alonso has said that he is satisfied with his qualifying performance after having a "weird weekend" ahead of Sunday's Monaco Grand Prix.
While Daniel Ricciardo and Red Bull Racing stormed to a dominant pole position in the Principality, Alonso secured seventh on the grid for the race where he will start alongside Carlos Sainz Jr on the fourth row.
"It's been a weird weekend, sometimes difficult, FP1 and FP3 especially," said Alonso who was 1.3s adrift of Ricciardo's record-breaking 1m 10.810s pole lap.
"The car was not well-balanced, and I felt more confident to push at the right pace. We changed a lot of things for qualy. The team did a great job, understanding some of the issues and going around on the setup.
"In qualifying I felt the car was much better and confident into the car, so you build the pace slowly with more laps and more grip. In the end, P7, it feels very good. It was the first time for us in Q3 in Barcelona with P9, and now P7 here, it feels also very good.
"Hopefully we can finish the job tomorrow in the race, and let's see on a more normal track. Monaco is quite unique. The performance today was good, but we need to keep working."
While Alonso secured seventh, Stoffel Vandoorne failed to replicate the performances of his team-mate in the second McLaren and starts in 12th place after missing out on Q3.
"We had a good day. FP3 went well," he said. "We've made some small tweaks to the car going into qualifying. I think everything was looking good.
"We had a minor issue with the car which we couldn't actually change before qualifying. That was a shame we didn't have everything in the right settings. I think other than that, considering the problems we had, the pace was actually quite promising.
"The pace was there for a Q3 spot today, definitely feel like we've missed out a little bit. We should have been much higher up," he added.
