Vandoorne: The car was undriveable

Vandoorne's junior CV is stellar, but stepping up to the Formula 1 grid with a team in dire straits, coupled to an uncompetitive and complicated car has put a question mark over his future at the highest level.

During qualifying at Silverstone on Saturday, he reported that his MCL33 was undrivable at Silverstone and as a result he failed to make it beyond Q1.

The Belgian driver said after his session on Saturday, "Today was really difficult. The car was undrivable today and we don't really understand why at the moment.

"I think we were actually in much better shape than we looked [on Friday] but since this morning something has been feeling fundamentally wrong with the car and we've not been able to really find what the problem was before qualifying."

"In qualifying as well the feeling was pretty terrible. Very bad. Nothing more we could do, so [it's] very frustrating. I felt very uncomfortable, no pace at all. [It was] impossible to really drive and to do anything. It's a shame to come out of qualifying like this."

The problem for Vandoorne is that he is being comprehensively outperformed by Alonso since last year, this time around at Silverstone he was 17th nearly a second slower than the Spaniard who will line-up 13th on the grid

Vandoorne said, "Clearly the other car seems to have some pace. I don't care how much the gap is because it's explainable with the issues we're having with the car. I'm definitely not looking at that."

A day earlier in FP2 Vandoorne was already eight tenths shy of his teammate, that gap grew to a full second after Saturday's FP3 session.

He explained, "After [Friday], there was an explanation as to why the cars were performing quite differently, so [for FP3] we made both set-ups the same."

"But something didn’t feel right in the car at all and we weren’t able to find what the problem was before qualifying. Something felt fundamentally wrong with the car," insisted Vandoorne.