With the McLaren-Honda partnership targeting a place in the top 10 for what would have been the first time this season, Alonso’s bid ended when his car shut down at the entry to the pitlane at the Hungaroring a few minutes into Q2.

Alonso initially attempted to push the car himself before being assisted by marshals and then mechanics from his own team, only to be told upon returning to the garage his efforts were in vain.

“I got lucky because I had some help, but when I arrived to the garage they told me I was not allowed to go back out again,” said Alonso.

“The rules say the car has to arrive by itself into the garage, so it was a lot of effort for nothing.

“It’s a little bit of a strange rule because we’ve seen so many times a car arriving on a crane and starting again the session.

“For me, [the car problem] was the wrong time, the wrong moment.

“It was something electrical, some connector, the power went off and that was a shame.

“We’ve been quite competitive all weekend, more or less in the top 10 in all the [practice] sessions, so it had been a good weekend for the team.”

Alonso will now start 15th, with team-mate Jenson Button 16th as the Briton missed out on a place in Q2 by a tenth of a second due to the ERS failing to deploy at the start of his final hot lap.

“We got the best out of the car in qualifying, in terms of the balance of the car it felt good, but I didn’t have any deployment all the way down the straight,” said Button.

“It’s quite a lot of power, over three tenths of lap time, so a massive amount before you have even arrived at Turn 1.

“It was OK after then. We were just unlucky I guess because we have never seen anything like it before.

“It’s is a tough one. We didn’t see this one coming. We’ll learn from it and hopefully it won’t be an issue again.”