McLaren Honda’s driver Fernando Alonso (left) and Scuderia Toro Rosso’s Carlos Sainz Jr (right) arrive to take part in the driver’s parade ahead of the Formula One Malaysian Grand Prix in Sepang yesterday.

DPA/Sepang, Malaysia

Fernando Alonso remained positive yesterday despite failing to finish in his first race for McLaren and seeing his former Ferrari team winning again at the Malaysian Grand Prix.
But it must have been hard to swallow for the former two-time champion that his successor at Ferrari, Sebastian Vettel, took the winning honours and a second podium in as many races for the Scuderia.
Until Sunday, Alonso had won the last race for Ferrari, in May 2013 in his native Spain.
Alonso himself had missed the season-opener in Australia in the wake of a concussion sustained in pre-season testing which had already revealed that a difficult season lay ahead of himself and teammate Jenson Button.
The Briton Button was 11th and last in Australia, and on Sunday shared Alonso’s fate of not finishing for the former top team McLaren.
But both rather looked at the bright side of the weekend action.
“This whole weekend has been better than I expected,” Alonso said. “We were able to run with other cars - Jenson and I weren’t simply fighting with each other. That was the first step we needed to take, and we’ve taken it already.
“Indeed, our race pace was surprisingly good; I was running with the pack, and I was even able to catch the Red Bulls before the pit-stops. That was a nice surprise.
“For us, these are the sort of reliability problems you’d usually discover in pre-season testing, but, given our lack of running over the winter, unfortunately we’re likely to encounter such issues in the first few races of the year.”
The 2009 champion Button said: “I enjoyed it out there - we’re actually racing people ... Fighting in the pack is the most positive thing to take away from this weekend - hopefully, before too long, we can start to pick them off on a race-by-race basis.
“Today has been a useful day; it’s just a pity that both Fernando and I ended up finishing it early.”
 McLaren will continue to work on every aspect of the car until the next race April 12 in China along with their new engine partners Honda who identied power unit problems as the reason for the drivers’ retirement - an ERS colling issue with Alonso and a turbo problem with Button.
“Both retirements were a result of the harsh use of the power unit within competitive race conditions, not the result of the high-temperature conditions encountered at this circuit,” Honda motorsport chief officer Yasuhisa Arai said.
“We’ll investigate the issues further and aim to improve things before Shanghai.”