McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button fear being off pace at Australian GP - Formula 1 News
McLaren drivers, Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button fear that the new team car MP4-26 might not be able to beat the forerunners, Red Bull and Ferrari at the season opener, Australian GP, in just under four weeks.
Last month saw the first three pre-season test sessions unfold, where both Red Bull and Ferrari gave some impressive performances. Although, Mercedes GP was not among the most reliable cars of the season yet its drivers, Michael Schumacher and Nico Rosberg
managed to mark the fastest laps twice. However, in the pre-season testing, McLaren was far from impressive and was dogged by mechanical issues also.
Button told the reporters on Wednesday, "It's tricky because we haven't had enough testing in the car to do proper set-up work, which is disappointing. When you're limited on parts and you have reliability issues, you don't get the testing done.
You need to really develop the car."
McLaren had been among the last teams to launch its 2011 package. The first testing was run by the team with the interim version of the last year’s car. Although the team has got two extra weeks now, due to the cancellation of the Bahrain GP, yet it is largely
believed that even this extra time is not going to make a lot of difference in the result of the Australian round.
The 2008 champion, and McLaren ace driver, Hamilton also stressed on the difficulties the team might face at Melbourne, if enough modifications in the car are not made by then.
Hamilton said while talking to the reporters, "One day we did only 38 laps. It's nothing major but we have had mechanical issues at the back of the car and that has really hampered us. Wherever we are right now, we will have to do twice as much work with
our update package for the first race because so will Ferrari and Red Bull."
However, the team boss Martin Whitmarsh is pretty confident and hopes that the team drivers and their car will be able to do well. He believes that the narrowly missed title of last season will be earned this year.
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