Vandoorne hails 'important' day as McLaren racks up mileage

Stoffel Vandoorne feels it was "important" for McLaren to bounce back from its reliability issues earlier this week and complete more than two race distances on the penultimate day of Formula 1 pre-season testing in Barcelona.

McLaren completed just 95 laps across the opening two days of the second test week at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya as it struggled with reliability issues on its Renault-powered MCL33 car, costing both Vandoorne and teammate Fernando Alonso track time.

Vandoorne was able to bounce back by completing 151 laps on Thursday despite spending an extended period in the pits in the morning as McLaren reviewed the data on his car, leaving the Belgian with a positive feeling come the chequered flag.

"Today was a very positive day for us, completing a lot of laps obviously," Vandoorne said. "This morning was good. We’ve been through a lot of set-up work, understanding about the tyre compounds, a lot of learning we’ve kind of missed a bit at the start of this week and also last week with the bad weather conditions, so that was good to go through.

"Then this afternoon we’ve completed a full race distance which obviously was nice to get all the laps under our belt, have a feel about the car in race conditions, go through different variation of tyres as well.

"I think it’s been a very productive day. It was my last day in the car as well, so now looking forward to Melbourne."

Vandoorne was pleased to go through the day without any major problems, stressing the importance of completing a trouble-free race simulation through the afternoon.

"During a race simulation you test the stress on the car, the cooling of the car, all the unexpected things - and to be honest everything went very smoothly during the race simulation we did," Vandoorne said.

"There were no surprises, no major problems. I think tomorrow Fernando will have the last day in the car, there will be some long runs planned as well to check reliability.

"In the end you know before having a good result, you need to go to the finish first, so today was important."