Brown agrees with Alonso that McLaren going backwards

McLaren boss Zak Brown agrees with his driver (Fernando Alonso's) recent comments, when he states that McLaren are going backwards instead of forwards.

Stoffel Vandoorne finished in twelfth place in the Italian Grand Prix - with his team-mate Alonso being forced to retire with even more reliability issues from their Renault engine.

McLaren have just ended a three-year nightmare spell with Honda as their power unit supplier, and there were a lot of fans who believed that the Japanese manufacturer were the reason behind the deminishing McLaren.

However, since the switch to Renault, more reliability and performance issues have been present for the Woking-based side.

Brown completely holds his hands up that this season has been far from pleasing, but believes that they will get back to somewhere near their best next season.

"I think other teams have developed at a faster pace than ourselves," Brown told Autosport. "It appears that we've gone backwards. I think everyone else has gone forwards but in F1, if you're not going forwards, you're going backwards."

Spa-Francorchamps and Monza have been the last two tracks raced on and both are power-heavy tracks and Brown admitted that this has meant the car hasn't performed as well compared to others.

"We will continue to push on this car but unfortunately we've produced an extremely poor race car that is not responsive to changes," the McLaren boss added.