Dennis: We could not be more prepared

Dennis told reporters on Saturday, after Hamilton had qualified fourth on the grid, that McLaren had spent more than two weeks going through an exhaustive process of tests to ensure the Briton will not suffer any reliability problems like the gearbox issue that cost him the title 12 months ago.

"We used all the time to run every single possible scenario that we could think of," said Dennis. "And also introduced all the problems that we imagined could occur and factored those in.

"Can we damage a nose? Can we stop? Can we change a nose and still come fifth? All those things we factored into every scenario we could think of.

"We increased the intensity of the real-time analysis so we should be able to pick up any variation or tyre pressure within two or three seconds so that if he does pick up a puncture and he's a few hundred yards from the pit-lane entrance that we can pick it up fast enough.

"Every single part on the car has been re-analysed. We looked at the history over the last year of each components reliability, anything that falls close to being of concern.

"I can say whatever the outcome, if our car fails - and we don't want that to happen - that no more effort could have been put in than we put in."

Dennis says he is calm ahead of this season's finale, despite another tight and controversial season-long battle with Ferrari, and said that if McLaren should lose, then he was satisfied his team had done everything they could to win in 2008.

He added that bringing a new rear wing and aero tweaks for the MP4-23 to the last race was evidence of how hard McLaren has pushed for the final race.

"You can only do your best and if that isn't good enough you've got to be able to look back and say is there any more we could done?" said Dennis. "And I can categorically say now that we couldn't have done more.

"The 0.15 of a second that we improved the car from the last grand prix to here is the most expensive tenth that we have ever, ever produced. We threw everything at this race, to get that squeezed out after the intensity of our development programme has been a huge amount of effort.

"We can't have made it faster, put more effort into making it reliable and we can't have put more effort into trying to accommodate anything that could happen in the race tomorrow.

"If we fail, you will obviously be very critical especially as I've set myself up, but the one thing we won't be doing is going away from here saying we screwed up because we could have put more effort into it."

One another potential hurdle Hamilton must overcome is the close proximity of Fernando Alonso at the start.

Alonso mischieviously went on record last week stating he would rather see any team than McLaren win the world title, having acrimoniously split with them after this race last year.

Dennis hopes that Alonso won't be a factor in the outcome of the title fight.

"First of all I wasn't there," he said when asked about Alonso's comments. "If you are accurately quoting Fernando and he said he'd rather have anyone other than McLaren then it would be very easy and it's very tempting to go back and talk about some of the weaknesses in his character, in his approach to grand prix racing. But I'm not going to do it.

"I hope that, not just him, all the grand prix drivers should realise that to come down to the last grand prix to determine the world champion is a good thing and that both of these guys should be given every opportunity to try to beat each other.

"I hope that all drivers are clean and appreciate that their role is to allow these guys to fight fairly and not interfere with the world champions and that applies to everybody including Heikki and Kimi.

"That's my wish and I hope whoever is world champion isn't soured by the behaviour of any other driver."