McLaren say form not affected by spy row

Last year, McLaren were fined $100 million and stripped of all their constructors' points for a spying controversy over leaked Ferrari information.

McLaren's new car, unveiled today, also underwent an FIA investigation in order to check if Ferrari data has been used in its design.

And although Whitmarsh admits that there were moments the team got "slightly distracted" from their job, he is confident they have enough concentration to not affect their 2008 performance.

"I would like to say that it has made no impact, but the reality is a whole variety of things stray into the time of the engineering and management team," Whitmarsh told reporters. "We were fighting to win a championship last year, ourselves and Ferrari.

"In the last third of the season we were putting a lot more work and development into it to compete for that championship, so I am sure that we both were slightly distracted from developing this year's car. However I think it is maybe a testament to the determination to both those organizations that we are out launching the cars early.

"The car that is being launched downstairs, as I think is the case with our competitor, will not necessarily look the same in Australia. Ours certainly won't look the same. We will evolve and develop the car between now and the beginning of the season. It has a lot of performance left in it.

"We had to fix the specification that gives the aerodynamicists and the other engineers the ability to develop the performance of the car. We hope and believe we have done that, and we will keep pushing.

"But inevitably there is a lot of challenges in any business on your time, so to answer your question, we have had a whole number of distractions from trying to win the world championship last year, and a range of other issues which really took some time. But I hope overall that we have had enough focus and concentration to manage to cope."

McLaren volunteered to stop development on three areas of their car that could have been inspired by Ferrari data, but Whitmarsh says the team will not be handicapped by that either.

"No. We volunteered those three areas," he said. "We did not want there to be any ambiguity or question during the course of this year that any of our programme had been influenced by the events of last year. But we of course are happy that there is no influence on the development of last year's car or this year's car.

"But we accept that it would be useful for us and for this sport to live without any of those questions or challenges. So we came up with those three areas. We do not believe that we are handicapped by that. We are in there with equal opportunity with the other teams to hopefully develop a competitive car, and to compete and win races.

"So clearly there are a lot of areas, a lot of tools on the car to address various handling issues. And despite the regulation changes that take away some of the electronic aids, but nonetheless we are confident that we can develop the car to give our drivers the ability to win races."