McLaren driver Jenson Button has refused to make any predictions as to where the Woking-team will stand against its rivals this season, despite a much improved pre-season testing programme.
McLaren and its engine partner Honda endured a miserable campaign in 2015 as it struggled not only with performance but dire reliability which saw Button and team-mate Fernando Alonso use more than double their allocated engines.
This year has already started on a more positive note with McLaren completing far more test mileage than last year and with far fewer reliability problems – in fact the team avoided any major issues with both Button and Alonso giving positive feedback on Honda's new power unit.
Despite that, Button feels there is much to do before he can confidently say they'll be competitive.
"I'm hoping we won't be hanging off the back but there's still a lot of work before I feel that we are properly competitive,” he is quoted as saying by Crash.net.
"There's still a lot of work needed to find a set-up that really works for us because we're not there. So a lot of work still needed."
Button is therefore refusing to be drawn into making any predictions as to what he believes he and the team can achieve in '16: "I have no targets. My only target is to push, to give it our all, give our maximum and we'll see what the results are.
"There's never a positive of me setting a target right now because as a positive person you're always going to target higher than possibly maybe you can achieve, and then you just get knocked down by other people, so it's not worth it."
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