Stoffel Vandoorne: “Our best day of the season”

MGU-H at half-mast during the Bahrain Grand Prix weekend, then water leak at the ERS during the first day of testing on Tuesday and Wednesday, travel on the Sakhir track did not had so far not smiled on Eric Boullier's men.

Yet yesterday, a clearing appeared in the clan McLaren – Honda, Stoffel Vandoorne, requisitioned to succeed Oliver Turvey in the MCL32, was able to complete 81 laps without experiencing serious problems on the car of Woking.

« It's probably our best day of the season, Vandoorne proclaimed yesterday. This is the first time that we have had a day without major problems, and where we were actually able to continue our program.

I think we completed everything we wanted to do, and we completed a lot of the things we didn't manage to do in Barcelona. »

Confirm over time

After an event in Bahrain, where Fernando Alonso and Stoffel Vandoorne suffered (the Spaniard indicating in his radio during the race, “never having driven with so little power ), this progress sounds like good news for the British-Japanese tandem. Vandoorne recalls, however, that this day without “clouds” must call for others.

“It was a good day, but we need every day like this, and there's no guarantee it will be next time, warns the Belgian.

We need to learn very carefully from what we did on Wednesday and hopefully carry that over to the next meet and see some improvements.

It was positive for me and the team to be able to try a number of different directions with the settings. There were some new parts on the car – some pretty fundamental things – that we wanted to try and learn about. It was really helpful to see where the performance was coming from and very productive. »

Eric Boullier, competition director of McLaren Racing, also remains cautious, the problems encountered before Wednesday still remaining under investigation in the Honda clan.

“It is difficult to understand the problems encountered over the last few days, because today we managed to race without problems, but Honda is working hard to understand where the weaknesses lie. » explains the Frenchman, who nevertheless highlights the progress made.

“We managed to scale with a more aggressive setup, gathered a lot of information and tested a lot of solutions, so both in terms of data and results it was a very positive day of testing. »