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Fernando Alonso: 9th or 10th won't change my life

Fernando Alonso says qualifying 13th for the Australian Grand Prix is "nothing to celebrate" for McLaren and insists taking points in Sunday's race is not good enough for the team.

McLaren was expected to struggle at the season-opener following a disastrous pre-season littered by reliability issues, however, Alonso comfortably made it into Q2 and ultimately qualified 13th in Melbourne. While he said the team's qualifying performance had positives, the Spaniard admits a place on the sixth row of the grid is not what he wanted.

"I think we came here with no clear picture of where we were and the worst case scenario was that we were very uncompetitive and reliability was a big issue in testing," Alonso explained.