Lewis Hamilton admitted that the McLaren is not currently a championship-winning car following the completion of testing © Getty Images
McLaren team principal Martin Whitmarsh has said that the team is hoping to find a second when it adds new upgrades to the car in Melbourne.
The MP4-26 looked off the pace in testing and Whitmarsh confirmed that the team is not certain where it stands, but needs to improve the performance of the car.
"I think it's very difficult to judge competitiveness," Whitmarsh said. "I personally wasn't satisfied with the performance of our car at the tests. I want us to be significantly quicker and I believe that we've implemented some changes which are aimed at making the car over a second quicker than it was during the tests. The aim is to certainly add more than a second of performance with the round of modifications we will add for the Australian Grand Prix."
McLaren had been experiencing problems with its exhaust system, and Whitmarsh confirmed that this was an area in which it has attempted to find a more simple solution.
"We have a completely new floor and a new exhaust system," he said. "There are a lot of other bits and pieces, but they're the clear and obvious ones that people will see in Australia. I'd say it is a simpler design than we've had before, I think the exhaust systems have become quite extreme on quite a lot of the cars; I think we in particular had very extreme solutions but I think that they were not delivering, in my opinion, sufficient benefits for their complexity.
I believe that the car isn't fundamentally a bad car. I believe that we need to unlock the exhaust-blowing potential. We had some very creative ideas, some of which could have worked spectacularly well. But if they were to work spectacularly well then they had to be sufficiently durable to be raceable, and frankly some of our solutions weren't, and that's why I think we had to go back on it. But I think in doing so we found some interesting performance."
Despite his optimism, Whitmarsh acknowledged that it was a gamble to attempt to make "dramatic changes" between the end of testing and the start of the season.
McLaren has been working to try and maximise the performance of the MP4-26 © Sutton Images
"I'm not satisfied where the car was from a reliability or a performance side in the tests," he said. "I guess with some risk we have made some fairly dramatic changes to the car, and those changes we'll see in Australia, so there's some risk in that. But we think it was the right thing to do and we're hopeful that that risk comes off and that the car is a lot more competitive."
Having been well off the pace at the start of 2009 and unable to match Ferrari and Sebastian Vettel in Bahrain last year, Whitmarsh said that the team was experienced enough to deal with its current issues, and had already reacted to the situation.
"I've been to first races with the quickest car and I've been to the first race with one of the slowest cars in the past so you've got to react to that during the course of the winter. When people are working on a new car people take some risks, sometimes the risks pay off in terms of performance and reliability and sometimes they don't. I think this year there are a number of technical risks in our program, some of which I think caused us too much unreliability and not enough track time and perhaps weren't delivering the performance that they should have done. So we've reacted to that and we'll see how things are when we get to Australia."
Whitmarsh has previously admitted that McLaren may have "pushed over the limits" with the new car, but he confirmed that the team would still be aiming for victory when it got to Melbourne.
"I can't make any predictions but you always have to target winning races, so we're aiming to win the race. At the moment I think it's too difficult to make predictions so I'm not predicting we'll win it, I'm saying we're aiming to win it."
Credit: ESPN F1 (en.espnf1.com)
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