McLaren drivers Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button have both hinted that their 2011 car may not be set to be challenge for race victories from the start of the upcoming season, with the team having dropped back significantly for mileage over the first three of four pre-season test sessions.
With Ferrari leading the way for mileage, with 1,172 laps having been racked up in Valencia, Jerez and Barcelona so far, McLaren are placed ninth out of twelve teams and ahead of only the three new entrants of last year, with 842 laps to their name after a selection of technical problems which have considerably limited running time.
“When I first jumped in it the first reaction was not, 'Wow, we're going to blow everyone away,’ no,” 2009 World Champion Button told Reuters. “I don't think anyone would have felt that because it's got a lot less downforce, the (Pirelli) tyres are working very differently to the previous (Bridgestone) tyre.
“But there's nothing that really scares me about the car in a negative way, so there's a lot we can improve with this car through general setup work. This year, at the moment, we've had some issues in testing in terms of getting parts to the circuit and a couple of reliability issues, so we've not done as much running as we would have liked, which has hurt our setup work.
“But we do have four days and hopefully everything's going to run sweet at the next test and we get a lot of laps in and we can improve the base that we have; there's a lot still to extract from this car that we haven't because we just haven't had time to do it, we haven't got everything together yet, so we don't really know where we are compared to the competition.”
Compatriot, team-mate and title predecessor Hamilton added:
“Of course we'd love to have had more mileage. I think we've good things coming in the pipeline and we've definitely improved in the last couple days, we got 107 laps (in one day) at the last test.
“The 2009 car was terrible because it was hopping, three-wheeling through corners, it was locking up and it had no downforce.
"This doesn't lock up, it doesn't three-wheel and it handles really nice, better than last year's car, but it just doesn't have as much downforce...so that's where it feels weak.
“Hopefully we've got some more downforce coming onto the car before the first race.”
See also:
One test to go: The stats so far
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