Christian Horner says Martin Whitmarsh doubtful about his team’s ability to win races – Formula 1
Red Bull Racing Team boss Christian Horner doubts that McLaren boss Martin Whitmarsh is confident about his team’s ability to score wins at the upcoming races in the 2011 Formula 1 season.
“Of course McLaren say they will win, otherwise there would be no point in him turning up at the next race. Whether they believe it or not is another thing. They are a great team and they have made massive steps,” said Horner.
After Lewis Hamilton finished in 2nd place behind Red Bull Racing Team at the Australian Grand Prix, McLaren seem pretty confident about their chances of winning races in the near future especially after they applied major upgrades to their new
car.
However, McLaren are not as close as it seems since Sebastian Vettel won the race with a margin of 22 seconds over Lewis and during the qualifying session, the reigning world champion scored the pole position taking a lap time which was over 7 tenths faster
than Hamilton’s second fastest time of the session.
Nevertheless, the flapping undertray on the 2008 world champion’s MP4-26 can be pinned as a major reason for the 22-second margin during the race as the McLaren driver challenged Vettel quite actively before his car got damaged.
Lewis had to ‘nurse’ his car until the chequered flag in order to take the second place which was quite impressive.
Martin Whitmarsh believes that the rest of the gap can be made up by better understanding of the new car.
“We've seen a lot of exhaust blowing, and this is because increasingly the rear diffuser has become boxed in by the regulations. We had some very create solutions of our own, but they were very difficult to achieve technically, too ambitious,” Whitmarsh
told the media.
On the other hand, Horner stated that McLaren always have a pretty strong development process during the season and expressed hope that they would come to terms of their new car soon.
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