Fernando Alonso believes Haas has emerged as Formula 1’s early midfield leaders in 2018, adding he hopes McLaren can remain within touching distance of the US squad.

Haas enjoyed a strong pre-season test at Barcelona and had already been tipped by the likes of Mercedes to surprise this year heading into this weekend’s season-opening Australian Grand Prix.

The team set the lofty target of being within half a second of engine suppliers Ferrari in 2018, an aim that appeared to be a reality on Friday in Melbourne, as Romain Grosjean impressed with the sixth-fastest time in FP2, just 0.2s shy of Sebastian Vettel.

Grosjean’s laptime has led Alonso to believe Haas will act as McLaren’s benchmark, at least during the early stages of the season.

“We knew that Haas was probably the biggest surprise, they have obviously a Ferrari replica from last year and that was the car that won here last year,” he said.

“I think their car will be very strong in this first part of the season but hopefully we will be able to stay close to them. It’s difficult to know what each team did today but it looks like Haas is behind the top three teams.

“We’ll definitively get better and better, that’s logical,” he added. “We are the only the only team doing this fundamental change in the car, with a new Power Unit, so we will get better and better. But hopefully we’ll also be competitive from Day One here.

“I haven’t looked at the sector times yet, so we will look at everything overnight and analyse it, to try to understand what are the strong points of this car and what are the weaknesses to try and solve them.”

The Spaniard suffered an exhaust issue that left him stuck in McLaren’s garage for the majority of the opening session, but the Woking-based outfit recovered to get both of its cars within the top 10 in both FP1 and FP2.

Alonso, who finished 1.2s off pacesetter Lewis Hamilton’s time in second practice, says McLaren needs to take a smart approach into qualifying, in order to capitalise on predicted wet weather that is set to hit on Saturday.

“We lost a little bit of time in FP1, with some issues, but we caught up in FP2, so in the end it was OK, so hopefully we can put the best package together for tomorrow. Qualifying will be a question mark for everybody, because we’re all waiting to be all in the same conditions to see our level.

“We need to be ready, be flexible, because reliability and being on the track at the right moment will be the key, especially in wet conditions. We need to be smart, we need to be sharp to maximise every opportunity we may have.”