McLaren optimistic upgrades will work

The team has mounted a ferocious development effort to try and get back on terms with Red Bull and Ferrari in the title battle, but was unable to run everything it had hoped in Japan due to the track time lost to Lewis Hamilton's practice crash and the Saturday downpour.

McLaren's principal race engineer Phil Prew said yet more new parts would be on-stream for Yeongam, and that the team was now more confident about parts not used at Suzuka, including the new rear wing.

"We will certainly be running [the wing] on Friday, we have that rear wing back here," he said during this week's Vodafone McLaren Mercedes phone-in.

"We also have a modified front wing, so they're the two big updates that will be visible on the car. In addition to that we have some smaller mechanical updates which will be on the car as well and aiming to add to performance.

"We certainly will be running the new rear wing on Friday and continuing our investigates which were kind of cut short a little bit at Suzuka. Our understanding has improved and we're optimistic that we can make it work here."

He admitted that Suzuka had not allowed the progress with its new package that McLaren had hoped for.

"Really we ran out of time at Suzuka to gain the confidence that it was a robust solution to take racing," Prew said. "A good clear session on Friday here will give us a lot more track time and we're optimistic that we can work through a programme to give us that confidence.

"Obviously our desire and hope is that we can race that with confidence and get the performance out of it that we think is available."

Prew believes the Korean track's wide variety of characteristics will mean all three title-contending teams have a good shot at victory this weekend.

"Obviously it has some long straights with big stops, which is not dissimilar to Canada, which I think will favour our car," he said. "Sector two is a bit more like Turkey, where we performed quite well. And then you come to the last sector, which would typically be a very high-downforce sector, a bit more like Hungary perhaps.

"So if I had to say which car it favoured, I'd say it was actually quite a neutral circuit and there's aspects of the track that will favour every one of the top teams. It just depends whether we can gain enough on the long straights and the high-speed sectors to compensate for perhaps the strengths of the Red Bull in some of the flowing, long corners that we see towards the end of the circuit.

"I don't think any car in the top three will have it all their own way."