Montoya talks about new team

Speaking for the first time about his experience at McLaren after his early testing runs, Montoya said that he was confident the team could produce a car quick enough to allow him to challenge for race wins next year - but he needed to work hard on making sure it suited him.

"It would be very nice to be in a position to win the championship next year, but we need to see how competitive the package is going to be," he told autosport.com. "I needed to begin to work with the team and so far so good.

"Today we were quite quick, yesterday we were quite quick, but still there are quite a few things we need to improve to adapt the car to my driving style. But apart from that it's okay."

Montoya claims that the biggest problem he faces with the MP4-19B that he is running is that the car appears to have an understeery characteristic - something that the Colombian has traditionally suffered with in F1.

"I think it's got too much understeer, way too much understeer," he explained. "But I think it's a matter of set-up more than anything else, so we are working on it.

"But it's getting better. We've worked a lot on it, because it was very pointy the first time I drove it, but the team's other drivers are quite used to it. I think I've been driving a car that was completely different and I've been working quite a lot on calming this car down and now I feel more comfortable. But I still haven't got rid of the understeer."

He added: "If I didn't have the understeer, then it would be perfectly adapted to my driving style. I think I need to adapt myself to the car, so there's a bit of work to do on the set-up, a bit of work to be done on me and we need to get to a point somewhere in the middle to make the car work for me."

Although Montoya was reluctant to make any comparisons between his old Williams and what he has found at McLaren, he did admit that there were very few similarities between the two cars.

"They are very different," he said. "The engine characteristics are different and the chassis characteristics are different. There's nothing similar between the two cars.

"But the way the team works is quite similar to what Williams does; you work with the engineers the same way, you tell them how you feel the car is behaving and they work based on that."