Lewis Hamilton has given a stark overview of McLaren’s pace, admitting that they are behind Red Bull and Ferrari.
The McLaren driver added that the MP4-26 might not be on a par with the aforementioned teams when it comes to the first race in Australia, but he hoped it wouldn’t harm his chances too much.
“We’ve had a few issues, and we haven’t done a lot of laps,” he told the Independent. “I did only 38 laps one day. It’s nothing major, but there’s been a mechanical issue with the rear end.
“You’ll go out once it’s been fixed and it goes [wrong] again… But I did 107 laps at the last test, which was encouraging, but we are still quite behind on mileage,” he said. “We won’t be able to catch all of that up, but I’m hoping that it won’t hurt us too much.”
With some journalists already dubbing the McLaren ‘the whale’, it’s led to some speculation that the team could be set for another year catching up to the leaders, as was the case in 2009.
Hamilton rather hopes that isn’t the case, but he did admit that the Woking-based outfit needed to work doubly hard to catch-up if they want to be on the pace come the opening races.
“Performance-wise we’ll be able to catch up at some stage, but I’m hopeful that it’ll be earlier than in some other years. It’s always difficult to catch up.
“In 2007, 2008 we were pretty much on a par with Ferrari. They were about a 10th of a second ahead in testing and it stayed that way for the first couple of races. But that was OK,” he added.
“Where we are starting now, we have to come up with twice the progress to close the gap to Ferrari and Red Bull, and that makes the challenge tougher.”
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