Dennis: front row no 'flash in the pan'

Raikkonen had been left with the bare minimum of time to put in his final qualifying effort - and only a fastest final sector on his out lap enabled him to cross the start-finish line just one second before the chequered flag came out.

When asked whether this was the fastest out lap he had ever seen, Dennis said: "I don't know. I was holding my breath actually.

"We knew we had to push. We lost a little bit of time in the traffic, losing 10-15 seconds, and had a little bit of a slow lap off the previous set (of tyres) so it was cumulative. We knew it was tight but it wasn't designed to be that tight that is for sure."

Although earlier in the weekend Raikkonen publicly doubted McLaren's abilities to win races on pure pace at the moment, Dennis believes that the situation is not as clear cut - and that the team's front-running pace at Monte Carlo and Silverstone is a true indication of where they are.

"Well I don't think either Monte Carlo or here is a flash in the pan. We still don't have everything resolved but there is no question that the cars here are working much better.

"As always in motor racing when you are a two or three, or three or four tenths off, it is a very small amount of time when you spread it around all the corners, and there is one particular characteristic which we are trying to deal with.

"But the cars have got better. There are a lot of developments coming through but no one stands still. We are not giving up on anything, either championship or race wins, but we will take it one race at a time. It is a systematic improvement for the performance of the team."

Raikkonen's chances of a podium finish at the Monaco Grand Prix were wrecked by a heat shield failure behind the safety car - when new developments put on the car for the race failed because they had not been thoroughly evaluated for the precise slow conditions that the Finn experienced in the race.

Dennis believed that was the price the team had to pay for trying to close down the gap to the cars at the front of the field.

"When you are competitive you can have a very systematic approach to how you increase the performance of the car, so you can take a far more cautious approach," he explained. "When it comes to catch up you have to be more calculating but you have to accelerate the speed of development.

"Monte Carlo was the result of improvements we had put onto the car prior to that race, and we had not run slow enough in our testing. It seems perverse to say to run slow to evaluate the repackaging but that it was we should have done and that is what we didn't.

"We just didn't have the time. We thought we had been very thorough but it caught us out at Monte Carlo with an overheating area on the car, which ultimately caused an electrical fire.

"But do we have the pace for the race? We don't believe there is any reason why not. It is a real pace."