McLaren had a disastrous testing season but after ‘going back to basics’ by hurriedly producing a less exotic exhaust and floor combination the team may well have turned its season around.
Jenson Button was fastest today – although he admitted that it might not mean much – and was delighted that the new parts worked so well and backed up what simulations had suggested.
“It’s definitely brought performance to the car, how much I don’t know. The feeling is much better, the car feels a lot more complete. When you have downforce at the rear, you can obviously add downforce at the front, then you get temperature into the tyres, you can have braking performance, there’s so much that comes with downforce.
“I’m very happy with how hard the guys have worked and what they’ve brought to this race, because in testing it was looking pretty tough for us. They’ve worked so hard, they’ve brought something here that’s good. I don’t know how good, but I’m pretty happy with the step we’ve made.”
The impressive thing today was that after such an unreliable time in testing the team had no problems with parts that had not be run before.
“We’ve got reliability. That’s something we haven’t had all winter, so finally to have a car which can run for as many laps as we want it to, it’s great. You’re able to do set up work then and improve the car. A positive day.
“I still don’t think there’s any use looking at the times. People are doing different things, and there are so many variables now with KERS and rear wings, we’re not going to get too carried away. It’s a positive day because we’ve been able to do so much running and get a feeling for the car in many different fuel loads. Lots of information to go through tonight and hopefully we’ll improve a bit further.
“We haven’t done a lot of reliability work because we haven’t had reliability, so it’s been a tough winter. Here we have the reliability, and we’ve picked up performance. The car feels nice to drive, still a few niggly things that we’ve got to sort out, but the basic balance is much improved from what we had in testing.”
Adam Cooper F1 