Ron Dennis is not worried about his team

Ron Dennis, the head of the McLaren-Mercedes team, says there is no need to worry about the lack of performance of his team during the recent off-season tests and is confident that they will be among the contenders for the title.

The new MP4-24 often occupied the bottom of the timesheet during testing, but Dennis is convinced that Lewis Hamilton and his teammate Heikki Kovalainen will be among the leaders in Melbourne.

« Whatever level of performance we have today, McLaren will be a competitive team, » he stated to the BBC.

« That means we will fight for the world championship. »

The objective is to go to Australia with the most competitive car. Not coming out of each test session with the best time is not so bad. Testing is a more disciplined approach to making the car faster. You must then ignore the performance of other teams.

He added: « While our main competitors finish evaluating in two days, we still have the capacity to evaluate ourselves next week in Jerez. In Australia, it will be the first real knowledge of the performance of each team on the grid. »

« We expect our car to go fast at every Grand Prix and we plan to maintain our pace in order to win the world championship. »

The English team continued to use a 2008 rear wing in several test events, but president Ron Dennis refuted that this is a sign of a problem with the 2009 aerodynamic package.

« We used a 2008 rear wing because it is closer in performance to the wing we will have in Australia, » he stated.

« This does not mean that we are lost or that we do not know what we are doing. »

However, he admitted that McLaren had fallen behind on its schedule.

“We lost a little time,” admitted Dennis. “We had a strategy for this year which was to wait until the last moment to produce our aerodynamic package for the Australian Grand Prix.”

« This gave us some production challenges. We will only start using the new aero package planned for the first race of the season in the last days of testing. »