HOCKENHEMI, Germany — Fernando Alonso has called on McLaren to conduct a deep investigation into Stoffel Vandoorne’s car after his teammate struggled for performance for the second weekend in a row.
Vandoorne qualified last and over 0.7s off Alonso’s best time after what appeared to be another underwhelming performance from the Belgian. But Alonso, who qualified 11th, says the team’s data shows that Vandoorne’s car is lacking downforce and has called on McLaren to get to the bottom of the issue.
“I think Stoffel is doing all he can,” he said. “I think in the last two races it seems that car has some sort of performance issue and there are some clear signs on the data that there is less downforce on that car.
“We’ve been changing some parts in the garage, new parts, old parts, etc. but we need to go deep into that investigation, because with both cars close to the points it’s always going to be easier.”
Vandoorne said the gap in performance was not down to him.
“Yeah definitely I didn’t forget how to drive a car. The cars are in a similar spec it’s just that we can see an issue on the car. We’ve changed over a lot of parts already and at the moment we don’t have a solution for it, to make it just work normally.”