I suppose this is what happens when you release the car late and have little time to find out how to tame it.Will they be rolling out anything new on the car in the final 2 days?
Well two problems do not seem much of a problem really, just that their immaculate record in testing has been ruined. Mondays and last weeks sessions were much, much better topping around 2 race distances a day. Hope not, they need to find what the problem was immediately, as I said to Kyle they have had a brill testing period compared to last year, so a few mishaps here and there are OK. Not like Lotus and their major chassis problems. Melbourne Practice 3 or Qualifying is where assumptions can be made really.
I'm going to bet that the Merc doesn't get 1 podium all season. I think next years car may be better.
Theyre in a similar situation to BMW. They spend more money than a small country to develop the car, only for it to turn out as a right pile of ****e (BMW F1.09)
I think this might answer your question... "I think the car's strong - stronger than it was last year at this point," Lewis said. "With the fuel loads that we've been running, I think we are relatively strong compared to the others, but I'm not necessarily saying we're the fastest. We'll find out when we get to Melbourne. "But I definitely feel we have a competitive car and we'll be fighting for a podium finish, for sure." The 2008 World Champion believes McLaren has not shown its hand yet. "I think people have been running a lot less fuel than I have been running," said Hamilton. "I think we've just been focusing on our programme. With the fuel load that we've been running, I think we seem competitive when you do the calculations. "But that doesn't really matter to us at the moment. It's how the car feels and what we can improve on." Asked if McLaren was likely to do a low-fuel run this weekend, Hamilton replied: "We probably won't do that until Melbourne." He also underlined how much stronger McLaren's position was compared to 12 months ago, when a radical exhaust system left it struggling in testing and forced a last-gasp redesign, despite which the team still took a podium in Australia. "If you look at last year, we arrived in Melbourne and finished second in that race, and we had less than half the mileage anyone else had from testing," said Hamilton. "We're now up there with them and we've definitely done a similar amount of mileage to everyone else, and put good enough mileage on the car to understand where the car wants to be."
I was pleased to see that, hoping it meant they might have a chance of points this season, but I was a little worried by their long runs. On the hards, Heikki went from 1:30 to 1:32's as the tyres wore out, whilst the Mercedes was doing 1:26's to 1:28's on the same tyres. If that's a true reflection of race pace, then 4 seconds off the pace of Mercedes is more than they ever were last season.
It's probably the new chassis and new exhaust system that Autosport mentioned earlier. This is what Sky do. They rarely break news themselves, just scan the airwaves and pass it off as hot off the press.
It's definitely the former. Every analyst has been saying that Red Bull along with McLaren have looked good out on track.
After remarkable reliability at the first few tests, several teams seemed to have various problems today. And lets not get too carried away with the Caterham time, it was on supersofts, unlike most of the others.
