To win, we must beat Mark Webber – McLaren
Team McLaren has admitted that Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button cannot afford another retirement or even a finish behind the championship leader, Mark Webber at this weekend’s Korean Grand Prix if they want to keep their championship chances alive.
Lewis is currently 28 points off from the championship leader while his teammate, Jenson Button is 31 points adrift with just 3 races remaining this season. McLaren has not been performing up to the mark as compared to the Red Bulls and Ferraris since the
past two races and the team’s principal race engineer, Phil Prew is aware of the challenges ahead.
“I think our target is very much to get on the podium and we need to be in front of Webber. We need to have two cars at the front competing for the front row of the grid in qualifying and then delivering a race result on the podium,” he told the Vodafone
McLaren Mercedes phone-in.
The last two venues did not suite McLaren but Prew is confident that his team should be competitive at the new track in Korea.
He believes that it is a good combination of quite a few different sorts of circuits as it has big stops along with long straights that should suite McLaren. However, the principal race engineer also believes that it will be any man’s race at the Korean
International Circuit.
“It just depends whether we can gain enough in the high-speed section to compensate, perhaps, for the strengths of Red Bull in the long corners that we see towards the end of the lap,” he added.
He believes that there are certain areas that will suite the Red Bulls while some areas will suite the McLarens and Ferraris better.
Prew said that McLaren has understood the problems they were facing with their new rear wing at the Japanese Grand Prix and he is hoping that the new modifications might give his team an edge over the rest of the teams this weekend.
“We will certainly be running it on Friday. We also have a modified front wing and those will be the two visible updates on the car. In addition to that we have a number of smaller mechanical updates which are all aiming to add to the performance,” he confirmed.
The team hopes to return with a new rear wing this Friday and it seems that this was the answer to Karun Chandhok’s statement when he said that McLaren will have to do something extra if they want to win at the Korean Grand Prix.
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