Fernando Alonso says his fifth-place finish at the season-opener at Albert Park is just the start for the McLaren-Renault partnership.
Alonso's fifth-place finish in Melbourne is McLaren's best result to the start of a season since 2014. The Spaniard made the most of Haas' pit-stop troubles, which forced both Romain Grosjean and Kevin Magnussen to drop out of the race and the subsequent Virtual Safety Car and Safety Car period to move up the order.
While Alonso is aware of the substantial gap between Formula One's three leading teams and the rest, he is optimistic that McLaren can close the gap in the coming races.
"I think our race pace was more or less what we had expected, we're faster in race pace than in qualifying, but as of today we cannot get everything out of the car because we're still lacking some parts. I believe we are at the lowest point of our curve, there's a lot of things we really have to improve, we need to bring the updates for the next couple of races to be close to Red Bull as soon as possible.''
Alonso kept Red Bull's Max Verstappen at bay for the final stint of the race after getting ahead of the Dutchman under the Virtual Safety Sar. The two-time champion believes the change from Honda to Renault power has changed the way he and McLaren can go racing in 2018, in terms of being able to attack and defend from other cars.
"The situation [with Verstappen] was always under control and, as I said yesterday, this year we can defend our position, we can attack, so it's a different kind of racing for us. I'm happy, it was a good start, as I said yesterday we have a lot of potential to get out of the car, I hope we can extract it all and hopefully in the next few races we can fight higher up the field."