Fernando Alonso thinks McLaren can be "very optimistic" after an encouraging Friday practice in Bahrain.
Alonso finished the FP2 qualifying simulations in 12th, which would be good enough for Q2 on Saturday, and was seventh in FP1. Friday practice rarely reveals a completely accurate picture of the rest of the weekend but Alonso is happy with the steps forward he has seen from McLaren in the short turnaround since China.
"We need to put many things in place, but all the things we are doing at the moment are putting us in the right direction," Alonso said. "Today we were 1.5 seconds to the leaders, so definitely a step forward again. Even if we don't have any magic parts in this race, four days from China, little tweaks, downshifts, upshifts, braking performance, things in the background, with hard work from the engineers, is putting some performance on the car, so we have to be very optimistic and happy with today."
While Alonso showed clear progress, team-mate Jenson Button had a troublesome day with a stoppage in either session. Alonso admits this limited the data McLaren obtained from the day.
"Today I had a very smooth day without any problems, but unfortunately not the same for Jenson and we lost a bit of info there. We shared an aerodynamic programme and we missed that information, so hopefully we recover tomorrow. We're in a period now where we are learning, and we saw today reliability is an issue, and still not 100% sure for us."