Dennis not worried by McLaren form

The 2009 McLaren-Mercedes has not been at the front in recent tests, but Dennis is confident that Lewis Hamilton and Heikki Kovalainen will be among the frontrunners in Melbourne.

"Whatever performance level McLaren have today we will be a competitive racing team," he told the BBC.

"That means we will be fighting for the world championship.

"The objective is to go to Australia and be the most competitive car there, not to come out of every single test at the top of the timesheets. Testing is about a disciplined approach to making the car go faster and you have to ignore the performance of the other teams."

He added: "Whereas our main competitors are finishing testing in two days we still have the ability to test next week in Jerez. When we get to Australia that will be the first measurement of everyone's performance.

"We expect our car to go faster with every grand prix and we expect to maintain our pace to allow us to win the world championship."

McLaren have continued using a 2008 rear wing at several tests, but Dennis denied this was a sign of problems with the 2009 aerodynamic package.

"We ran the 2008 rear wing because it was more relevant in its performance to the wing that we are going to have in Australia," he said. "It doesn't mean you are lost or that you don't know what you are doing."

However he admitted that McLaren had fallen behind schedule.

"We lost some time," said Dennis. "We had a strategy for this year to leave it to the last possible moment to produce our aerodynamic package for the Australian Grand Prix.

"That in itself gave us some production challenges and we have really only started to run the car in the last day with the Australian aero package."