Martin Whitmarsh: “I don’t want to make it easy for him to leave this team…”

Martin Whitmarsh admits that Lewis Hamilton’s victory in Austin is huge boost to the McLaren team after a recent run of misfortune.

It was also achieved in one of the highest profile races of the year, in front of a lot of corporate VIPs.

“That was a fantastic result, and great for the team,” said Whitmarsh. “It’s our 12th victory in the States, we won here last time, that’s a good feeling and it’s important to us.

“It’s near the home of Exxon Mobil, and great to come here and do that for them. One race to go, and we like to go there and win that as well. That would be some compensation for some of the disappointments and some of the failures we’ve had this year.

“We’ve got to get better, we’ve got to get stronger, we’ve got to make less mistakes. We’ve had a lot of potential this year and we haven’t really got what we should have got from the potential that we’ve got in the team. We’ll learn from that and come out stronger next year, but at the moment we’re focussed on a few days time in Brazil. A great circuit, and again great history for us.”

Asked about the inevitable emotions involved as Hamilton’s departure draws near, he added: “I said to Lewis weeks ago we’ll have the emotion after Brazil, let’s really focus on doing the best job we can. We should have won two weeks ago and I felt sorry for him and sorry for the team, and obviously Singapore as well.

“His second ever win was in the States obviously and I remember that very well, and we had a great time after that. We’ve had some amazing highs together. I don’t want to make it easy for him to leave this team, but at the moment let’s focus and see if we can get the win in Brazil.”