Fernando Alonso was happy to get his McLaren into the final round of qualifying again this week at Monaco, although he admitted that it had been a very near thing.

“I got a little bit of stress in Q1 with the red flag when I hadn’t set a time,” he pointed out. “But we still had six minutes left.

“In the rest of qualifying we tried a few things, as we weren’t fully confident in the car. In the end we’ve made it into Q3, which is the first goal.

“We expected a bit more, to be seventh or eighth. We didn’t have the pace, I didn’t have the feeling in the car all weekend.

“I don’t have the full confidence to attack the corners here in Monaco, so I’ll be P9 tomorrow with Kimi’s penalty, it’s not bad, and we’ll see what we can do tomorrow, hopefully we can score some points.”

Ninth on the grid is still not as good as the team had been hoping for this weekend, where they felt they had a genuine chance of making in-roads into the likes of Mercedes, Red Bull and Ferrari at the front of the field.

“Probably our predictions were over optimistic, before coming here, but let’s see tomorrow if we can score a lot of points and finish the weekend on a high. Last year we expected to be competitive here and were tenth; we expected to be uncompetitive in Canada and we were tenth. Let’s see how the season goes and try to take any opportunity we can have.”

The one thing that could change everything tomorrow is the weather, with a forecast suggesting storms in the morning and rain in the afternoon.

“Rain or not, anything that can happen could be a help. We need some action in the race otherwise it will be a train of cars going around and the start will dictate the final positions.

“We’ll try to take whatever chances we are given,” he added. “Hopefully we’ll have some action as that will be good for the show.”

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