Alonso: Not much room to improve

Editor

Fernando Alonso has warned that there will be few on-track improvements from McLaren in the final five races as their "hopes are for next year."

Alonso's frustrations with McLaren-Honda's performance boiled over last Sunday at the Japanese Grand Prix.

Putting in the laps at Honda's home race, the Spaniard hit out at an "embarrassing" lack of pace and equated his power unit to a "GP2 engine."

His apparent anger led to reports suggesting that he could walk away from the team at the end of this season.

However, it seems Alonso has every intention of staying on – and he's working towards a better 2016.

"It is going to be difficult to see big progress," he told Autosport with regards to the final races of this season.

"The limitations we have now are quite clear, and this requires a bit of time over the winter to make most of the progress.

"But we are still using these remaining races for some set-up directions for next year, some aerodynamic improvements which might come to some races, and some more power unit experience.

"We cannot forget that from now we will have the same mileage as the Mercedes team going to Australia for the first race [of 2015].

"Overall this year we are down on laps, we are down on mileage on the whole package, but every lap we do we are learning something, so I'm sure some very useful information for next year will come."

He added: "Right now we have to be patient and understand in the five remaining races there's not much you can do. There is not room to improve much.

"All our hopes are for next year, but a lot of things have to change – the structure of the power unit and everything is a problem.

"But I'm optimistic. The first results of next year seem OK, so let's wait and see."