McLaren's Alonso to use 12th Honda engine of F1 season in Brazil

Alonso's wretched run continued in qualifying at Interlagos as he was ordered to stop the car on his first flying lap as McLaren engineers had spotted an abnormal temperature warning.

Alonso pulled off the track, and for a few minutes at least raised a smile as television cameras picked him up sat in a deckchair sunning himself, with his stricken car in the background.

Unable to identify the root cause of the problem, however, the team has had to change the entire power unit, meaning Alonso will be on his third of the weekend.

Alonso initially used a system that ran during the United States Grand Prix, only for that to blow during second practice on Friday.

McLaren then switched to the power unit used in Mexico, but with that failing in qualifying and with no stash remaining, a brand new engine has now been fitted.

In doing so, Alonso will take a 25-place grid penalty, although as he was due to start at the back anyway given his failure to set a qualifying time, it is again an irrelevance.

Overall, Alonso receives a 10-place hit for taking his 12th internal combustion engine, plus five places apiece for using an 11th turbocharger and MGU-H and eighth MGU-K.

Suggested to racing director Eric Boullier the number of incidents were now past the point of embarrassment, he replied: "We don't want these kind of results.

"We want to have more reliability. We try to get more performance, and we have achieved that, but it is true this unreliability is hurting a lot our performance. We have to fix it."