The two McLarens retired in eight laps

With the penalties imposed following changes to their engines, the two McLaren drivers monopolized the last row of the grid, which unfortunately is not the first time this season. Jenson Button and Fernando Alonso knew they were forced into an aggressive race, especially since they still had to go back to their pit to serve the remainder of their penalty.

Fernando Alonso thus made a very good start, finding himself on the attack in the first corners. Unfortunately, he did not go any further following a major collision with Kimi Räikkönen’s Ferrari: « I had a good start, gained a lot of positions in the first two corners. Kimi was in front of me and was on Prime tires. He came out of turn 2 with a lot of wheelspin. So I tried to overtake him but he lost control of his car and veered to the left, where I was. So we both went into the wall. Fortunately, we are both fine. It’s a strange accident since he lost his car in 5th gear, which means he had very little grip. »

Things didn’t go much better on the other side of the McLaren garage. In the opening laps, Jenson Button was busy changing tires before observing his mandatory stop-and-go. But he couldn’t go any further due to unidentified problems with his car. It was decided not to compromise a fragile machine any further: “Nothing was broken on my car but something was wrong. The settings on the steering wheel made no difference. The team decided to retire me: we put in a brand new engine this weekend and we didn’t want to damage it unnecessarily. So we decided to stop.”

Such an avalanche of misadventures could only create a sense of fatalism among the team’s leaders. Eric Boullier thus declared: « Murphy’s Law states that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. In the case of McLaren-Honda, it was 100% true this afternoon. We are going through tough days at McLaren-Honda, in Woking and Sakura, but we are not giving up. I have to admit it’s going to be hard, but we are resilient and we will move forward. »