'Huge potential' in Aston Martin, says Alonso

Fernando Alonso says there is "huge potential" in the Aston Martin car after qualifying 17th at the Australian Grand Prix following a difficult start to the Formula 1 season.

Alonso was 2.5 seconds off the pace in the first part of qualifying, halving the deficit he had had to the front in Friday practice in Melbourne.

The difference, he said, had been made because the team had been able to complete a series of laps.

The Honda engine finally ran reliably in second and third practice after being beset by problems in pre-season testing and missing the first session in Australia.

"That allowed me to finally be on track and in sync with other cars and try different things on the set-up," Alonso said.

"And even if the power-unit is the same as yesterday, we gained like two seconds today, just because we were on track and we were optimising a little bit things on the chassis and things like that.

"So, there is for sure a huge potential on the car, we just need more laps, we just need more consistency. And it seems very fragile at the moment.

"The whole winter has been a little bit with that feeling that there is much more to come, especially on the chassis side.

"We feel more or less OK in the corners and we feel we could be in the top 10 easily and then we cannot put laps together in the winter, and here thanks to a more normal P2 and P3 we found two seconds easily just because we run. It is matter of continuing to do laps and stay united."

Team-mate Lance Stroll could not run at all on Saturday at Albert Park because of engine problems and will start last.

Alonso said: "The mechanics, they've been working flat out and changing power-units day and night, you know, the last six weeks. So, even on the other side of the garage, with Lance being so unlucky in FP3 and 'quali' with zero laps, when you go on track and you are in the mix with a few cars, it's a little bit better than being dead last, as we were yesterday.

"Maybe that's enough to ignite a little bit of motivation in everyone in the garage. That's probably part of our job now as drivers, you know, to keep the morale of the team high in difficult moments."

The team are still facing a difficult situation and may not finish Sunday's race.

They have only two batteries left for their hybrid system, and none available at the Honda factory, so will have to run a cautious race to ensure they are even able to take part in the second grand prix of the season, in China next weekend.

"We are short on parts, there is no secrets on that," Alonso said.

"China is next week, so hopefully we can do as many laps as possible, hopefully we can do nearly the whole race.

"But the first sign that there is something potentially wrong, we cannot risk running, running, running until we make some big damage and then we compromise next week, so we will have to be very flexible.

"We are one team, we cannot separate the two things. There is no secret that the main problem is the PU. We are down power and reliability. We didn't manage many laps in the winter and now we are short on stock for the batteries, we cannot do many laps or we are short on parts. We need to fix the power-units and Aston Martin is trying to help as much as possible with Honda."