Alonso: Red Bull winning puts pressure on McLaren

Amid Honda's woes it has been generally accepted that McLaren have produced a good chassis, but with no other team to compare to Fernando Alonso believes the pressure will be on next year when the Woking built cars will be powered by Renault and their benchmark will be Red Bull.

The energy drinks outfit, relative to the Renault works team, are known for their superb chassis' and this year they have turned a car that struggled early on in the season, thanks to erroneous wind-tunnel correlation, into a race winning machine.

Alonso believes Red Bull's success will put pressure on McLaren in 2018, "I think the challenge is how can McLaren be in front? But McLaren should never be afraid of matching any other team because McLaren should be better than any other team."

Renault will afford equal status to both their old customer Red Bull and their newly acquired client McLaren, which sets the stage for an interesting comparison between the two teams and their respective drivers.

Speaking to reporters ahead of the Japanese Grand Prix weekend, Alonso pointed out. "We saw in Monza a very good performance from Red Bull, which was at a power circuit, so we were already quite happy with that Red Bull performance. In Malaysia it was another step forward and they beat the Mercedes without rain, without any different strategy, without anything, so that was good."

"At the same time that puts some pressure on McLaren because I think that car is quite efficient right now and is quite powerful at the moment from a chassis point of view, so we need to make sure that we do our job on the chassis side because the engine can deliver wins as Red Bull proved."

"So we have to match that performance on the chassis and that is a challenge, for sure," added Alonso who is expected to sign a contract extension with McLaren after this weekend's Japanese Grand Prix.