No Back-up Plan for McLaren

There had been speculation about the McLaren team reverting back to their 2012 car after the 2013-spec model proved problematic and difficult to understand at the Australian Grand Prix.

(c) Sky Sports F1

Both Jenson Button and new signing Sergio Perez struggled with the MP4-28. The Woking based team had a rather painful fall from grace, going from winning the 2012 season finale in Brazil to finishing ninth and 11^th in the 2013 season opener.

Rumours and gossip started to spread, as it always does (and fast at that), on the subject of reverting back to the 2012 model.

Martin Whitmarsh added fuel to the fire by saying “Purely from a technical point of view, it would be possible” earlier this week.

With relatively stable rule changes over the winter it would work, with a few design tweaks and adjustments to pass the new and stricter load tests.

However Whitmarsh has now rubbished those comments, saying “all our efforts are currently focused on understanding this year’s car, not considering last year’s car. We believe we can fix those issues.”

Despite dropping down the order, Melbourne was not a true representation of the cars pace. A wrong move switching to the dry tyres in the second qualifying session saw Perez knocked out and Button would have qualified higher had he not been out so long on the super-softs.

Whitmarsh added “At the moment we have to work hard on this car, we know it has got some areas of high potential and we know it has potentially more downforce than last year’s car.”

The word “potentially” is telling, the team have not found that extra downforce and obviously have a lot of work to do to utilise the cars strengths.

He went on to say “We just need to understand it and make sure (the performance) is accessible. We have all had cars in the past that have been difficult to get performance out of, even though some of the (downforce) figures are quite impressive.

“This car seems to be difficult in that regard and we need to work on it, understand it and fix it.”

The issue is not a quick fix though and we can expect McLaren to perform in a similar fashion this weekend in Malaysia.