Alonso and McLaren Coming for Red Bull?

McLaren’s Fernando Alonso believes his team can only improve on his 5th place performance in Sunday’s Australian Grand Prix.

The Spaniard benefitted from the retirement of both Haas drivers, as well as the virtual safety car, which enabled Alonso to overtake Red Bull’s Max Verstappen.

Alonso, spoke following the race, saying:

"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’s McLaren teammate Stoffel Vandoorne also finished in the points on Sunday and Alonso admitted:

“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."