McLaren seek swift end to spying row

With the FIA World Motor Sport Council due to start considering whether or not there is any evidence of Ferrari intellectual property on McLaren's 2008 car, the team have made it clear that they hope the matter gets sorted out as quickly as possible so they can focus their efforts on next season.

McLaren F1 CEO Martin Whitmarsh said: "I know the 2008 car doesn't have any foreign intellectual property in it, and therefore I think we've got to let the WMSC and FIA finish its investigations.

"I think we'll come out of this very shortly and will be able to put all of this behind us. And that's good for the sport. It's the right and appropriate outcome and we'll move on."

Whitmarsh said that the team are hoping to run their 2008 car as early at the Jerez test on January 8, and there are high hopes that the MP4-23 can improve on their very successful 2007 car that came close to allowing Lewis Hamilton to win the world championship.

Speaking to this week's Autosport, Whitmarsh said he had seen a big effort from McLaren engineers to ensure steps forward were made this winter.

"One of the encouraging things is Tim Goss - the chief engineer of next year's car," he explained. "He was chief engineer of MP4-21 and he's an immensely competitive guy and a really good engineer.

"During the course of the year, I could see in him how he aggressively fought for resources and capacity within the company to develop next year's car, because he's watched the success of MP4-22, which was led by Pat Fry. He wants to make 23 a better car.

"We've set ourselves a good target for the first race in terms of performance improvement, and we're already a third of the way to achieving that performance target - it's in the bag and we know we've already got that.

"We've got 70 per cent of the target identified and hopefully that will be realised and the engineers will be squeezing for the last few per cent of that performance. But I'm very confident that we'll have a car in Australia that's a good bit quicker than the car we had in Brazil."