Fernando Alonso says he feels prepared for the 2018 Formula 1 world championship season opener and could race tomorrow if required despite losing the majority of his penultimate testing day due to an oil leak with his MꦕcLaren.

The two-time F1 world champion completed 46 laps ꧒before an oil leak forced him to stop on track at Turn 7 two hours into the day's track action.

McLaren mechanics diagnosed the problem as an oil leak from the Renault-powered MCL33 which triggered the team’s first complete engine change while track action was ongoing. Despite a predicted three-hour change, Alonso returne🎃d to the circuit over six hours later with just 13 m🦋inutes of testing time left.

Alonso has played down the lack of running McLaren has experienced during pre-season tes꧋ting, after Stoffel Vandoorne suffered two battery iss𒊎ues and a hydraulics failure yesterday, and feels his team has the fundamentals in place ahead of the 2018 opening race.

“I will be in the car [on Friday], I will drive – hoℱpefully we will keep discovering new things on the car – but if Australia was tomorrow it’s okay,” Alonso said. “Probably we need the last day to do some lap🧔s, some long runs, to check extra things that you always discover about the new car.

“But in terms of fundamental answers that we need over🌟 the winter test, they are already okay and we have all of them, so I don’t need the last day to be honest.”

Alon♛so accepts he needs to catch-up on long run testing at Circuit de Catalunya but is content with the progress McLaren has made at the start of its new power unit partnership with Renault. The Woking-based squad signed a new three-year engine deal with Renault at the end of 2017 after splitting from Honda after three s🤪easons of unreliable and underperforming power units.

“All the important things in the programme we managed to ꦇdo in the morning, so the rest 🥀of the day was going to be about long runs,” he said. “I am not too stressed about the laps we lost today.”