Dennis: MP4-18 to Show True Pace this Week

McLaren chief Ron Dennis has promised his team's new MP4-18 car will be allowed to show its true colours this week when it is finally let of the leash in testing at Barcelona.

The new machine made its track debut in testing at Paul Ricard in the week before last Sunday's Monaco Grand Prix but the team deliberately forced driver Alexander Wurz to slow down as they went through systems checks.

But the Austrian test driver will be allowed to test the car's true performance this week and Dennis said: "We will run it aggressively in Barcelona and then we will know its true performance."

Wurz managed little track time during the three-day test after a problem left him with only 27 laps of running on the first two days and saw him finish bottom of the timesheets on both days.

His performance improved on the final day and he finished second behind the Williams-BMW of Colombian Juan Pablo Montoya but even then Dennis said the machine was not showing its full hand.

"I am confident we have made a good car and we went to Ricard with a firm commitment to do a systematic test," said Dennis. "We were not interested in speed, in fact we restricted it. On the last afternoon we ran a little harder, but we could not tell the real speed because the track configuration had changed and we did not have the right wing set-up."

McLaren regained the lead of the World Championship on Sunday when the old MP4-17D enabled them to claimed another ten points from Finn Kimi Raikkonen's second place and David Coulthard's seventh.

The team hope to introduce the new machine at the European Grand Prix, in the Nurburgring, in one month's time and Mercedes engine boss Norbert Haug said: "I have never seen a more impressive car."