Jenson Button and Fernando Alonso gave themselves a scare at the wheel of their McLaren

If the two McLarens managed to get into Q2, indicating that the performance of their car is improving, not everything is settled yet. Far from it. Indeed, Jenson Button had to fight throughout the race to try to adjust a car that had a nasty tendency to skid as soon as he pressed the accelerator: « My car was quite scary to drive today. As soon as I touched the accelerator, it would snap away. It was unpredictable: in low-speed corners, the car was simply slow because I immediately had wheelspin. In high-speed corners, it was simply scary because the rear would snap away immediately with the power. »

His final 16th place can be explained by the fact that he spent most of his race trying to find a solution with his team: « I was talking with my engineers for most of the race to find the source of the problem. We tried several balance changes to resolve it. It got a bit better at the end, but it was a difficult afternoon. »

Fernando Alonso was spared from these problems and long hoped he could fight to get into the points. Nevertheless, his mechanics also let him down as he had no brakes. This forced him to return to the pits, where he nearly hit his mechanic: « I got scared during my pit stop: I had no brakes throughout the lap, even less during the stop. This scared me for the mechanics, but fortunately no one was injured. My brake problems are different from Jenson’s yesterday in qualifying. In qualifying, he had a single disc that didn’t heat up enough, but I had no brakes at all. I think the rear discs stopped working. So I only had the front brakes. »

If the two Woking drivers have been claiming for weeks that Monaco is their best chance to score points, engineers will have to double their efforts in the coming two weeks to address the many issues still affecting the MP4-30.