“I think we confirmed more or less that it’s going to be a tough weekend for us as a team in terms of performance,” said Alonso on Friday evening.

“We lost a couple of runs that we had programmed and we missed the long run pace [run] for example today, so probably we will try tomorrow to repeat it and get that info.”

Alonso’s team mate Stoffel Vandoorne made way for McLaren junior driver Lando Norris in FP1 this morning – as Alonso did in Belgium last weekend – but echoed Alonso’s comments after his running in FP2.

“I don’t think there’ll be any miracles here for us this weekend,” he said. “We predicted it would be a difficult weekend and practice has already shown that it’s going to be a tough weekend for us here. So we’ll see what we can do tomorrow.”