Achieving more than 0.2s gain per raceMcLaren have opened up a clear performance gap between themselves and nearest Formula One rivals Ferrari, but the English team are vowing not to get complacent and are planning further improvements to their car.
Lewis Hamilton
won Sunday's U.S. Grand Prix to claim McLaren's third consecutive victory after Monaco and Montreal. But McLaren CEO Martin Whitmarsh believes his team will need to keep making minor adjustments to their car in order to remain ahead of Ferrari who expect to have picked up their pace by next month's French Grand Prix.
"This year more than ever, it's all about a broad number of very minor changes," Whitmarsh said. "We're really on a very micro-level managing airflow around the car. And we've got a great team of young engineers with the bit between their teeth, charging along.
"But they're not complacent because Ferrari is a good competition and want to win this championship too and they will keep the pressure on us.
"We've got high confidence in the engineering processes - we see improvements straight away on the stopwatch. We've got a reasonably good step forward in the pipeline for France and, looking at the development system, we've got some more things coming through."
Whitmarsh has pinpointed McLaren's work on hydraulics as the separating factor between them and Ferrari, who have managed just two third places in the last three races.
"Aerodynamics are still the determining factor," Whitmarsh added. "We started out at the beginning of the year with a target of 0.15 seconds per race improvement and we increased that to 0.2 seconds per race. Now we're doing better than that."
For their part Ferrari are guarding against over-reaction despite now lagging 35 points behind McLaren in the constructor's world championship after seven of the 17 races.
"We don't have to over-react, we need to work, altogether, at home, on all parts of the car, at the track, with the drivers, all the team," said Ferrari Sporting Director Stefano Domenicali.
"We were faster at the beginning of the season, McLaren is faster now and our objective is to go faster again and be faster than McLaren again, that's for sure.
"The message that we want to give is that we know that this is the moment that we need to react but we don't give up at all, the season is really very, very long."
Source AFP
