Fernando Alonso says he still has a "fantastic feeling" about life at McLaren but admits he and everyone else at the team deserve criticism for falling short of expectations this year.

McLaren has endured a terrible first season with Honda and arrives at the manufacturer's home grand prix at Suzuka having not scored a point since July's Hungarian Grand Prix. Alonso joined McLaren from Ferrari, a team which has now moved into the position behind Mercedes in the pecking order, with his replacement Sebastian Vettel claiming three wins this season.

Alonso understands the frustration of McLaren fans but says the team is doing all it can to make progress.

"It's difficult to take from the fan point of view, I understand, and we should be criticised for our performance because we are not delivering what people are expecting from us," Alonso told reporters in Suzuka. "But from the team point of view it's a little bit different because we cannot do much more than what we do, everyone is doing 100% of their ability.

"We need to learn lessons from everything we do. Last weekend in Singapore we had two retirements because of gearboxes overheating; we studied, we went deep into the problems, made those solutions and test them tomorrow in free practice. If we arrive at the home grand prix with a more or less competitive car is out of our hands."

With big changes to Honda's power unit not possible until the winter, Alonso says the everyone in the team - including himself - can improve to ensure McLaren goes into 2016 in the strongest shape possible.

"Everyone is doing what they can, everyone is working 24 hours a day to improve the situation in all areas because we need to improve the performance, the reliability, some of the procedures we do in the weekend, some free practice philosophies, the pit stops, as we saw in Singapore, some driver areas that we do sometimes.

"We've had some difficult free practices with minimal laps, so we go to qualifying and we have only one lap because in Q2 we don't manage to drive, so that lap is not perfect. We all need to improve - from the first mechanic to the drivers. We are in that part of the process and I will be happy at the end of the year if we keep growing that aspect here at trackside and if we keep making progress in the developing of next year's power unit and chassis."

Asked if it was difficult to process the fact McLaren was arriving at Honda's home race knowing it might not make Q2, Alonso replied: "It is not a surprise any more - this has been processed in February!"