Coulthard will persevere with launch control

After taking a dominant pole position in Monaco, Coulthard was left stranded on the grid at the beginning of the warm-up lap and stalled at the start proper in Spain. Team mate Mika Hakkinen also failed to get away in Austria.

Despite the setbacks, Coulthard has still managed to finish every race this season in the points and the Scot believes that using the system, warts and all, is more of an advantage than carrying out a manual start.

"We intend to keep using this system," Coulthard told Autosport's sister title Motorsport News, "because in all the simulations we have carried out up to now it showed itself to be much quicker than the manual start."

After carrying out 12 starts during testing at Magny-Cours last week, McLaren tester Alex Wurz had two faults, neither of which were believed to be the same as the problems which hampered Coulthard in Spain and Monaco.

"Also in all the tests," continued Coulthard, "the part of the system that failed in Monaco has worked perfectly. The difficulties in Monaco and Spain were different, but we're almost certain to have resolved the problems."

DC lies second in the drivers' standings, 12 points behind Ferrari ace Michael Schumacher and while the German sympathises with Coulthard, he does not believe that McLaren should be too worried by its reliability problems.

"It's unusual that McLaren has been having these problems," said Schumacher, "and I feel sorry for David. But on the other side, lets not forget that David has finished all this year's races, so you can't talk about bad reliability of the car."