Fernando Alonso says he is "incredibly motivated" for the new season, though he is braced for a difficult opening race for McLaren in Australia.
Alonso was a vocal critic of McLaren's engine supplier Honda during a farcical pre-season littered with reliability issues and a lack of performance from its power unit. With Honda lacking upwards of 30 km/h down the straights its F1 boss Yusuke Hasegawa has admitted the manufacturer is "a little scared" of the performance gap going to Melbourne.
Though Honda hopes to have an upgraded engine spec in Australia to the one it used in the second week in Barcelona's tests, Alonso is not expecting a huge step forward.
"After a difficult two weeks of testing we're prepared to face a difficult weekend in Melbourne," he said. "We'll do our best with what we have and there's a lot of hard work and collaboration happening within the team, but the lack of time before the first race means you have less options for big changes.
"The first step will be to work on reliability before we can make any assumptions or predictions about performance, and we will try to enjoy the weekend as much as we can."
Alonso is out of contract at the end of 2017 and made it clear coming into this season that his future in F1 beyond that expiry would hinge on his opinion of the new cars. Having had his first taste of 2017's bigger, faster cars, Alonso is excited for lights out at Albert Park.
"I'm incredibly motivated for 2017 and I can't wait to see what kind of racing this new shake-up of the sport will bring. We already know the sport is a lot more physical and the cars are more challenging to drive -- from a driver's point of view this is exactly what we were looking for in the new regulations, and I really hope this will translate to good battles on track.