Hamilton: McLaren needs to respond

Although Hamilton resurrected his world championship aspirations with second place in Korea, his car did not have the pace to match his main title rivals.

And with him effectively needing victory in the final two races of the season to capture the championship, he is urging McLaren to make the steps required to get him to the front of the field.

"We need to respond," said Hamilton after the Korean Grand Prix. "Clearly we have been doing everything we can to catch up, but the guys are doing a great job.

"Hopefully we can come away from this with great energy, take back the information from this weekend, find a couple of places where we are losing time and then see if we can improve coming into the next race. Then we can really attack."

Although he is 21 points behind title leader Fernando Alonso, Hamilton actually thinks he is in a good place going forward.

"I think clearly the pressure is on those guys," he said about Red Bull Racing and Ferrari. "We are in a strong position, Fernando is quite a bit ahead, and I could have done with those extra seven points [for winning] but I can still catch them up. 21 points is better than 28 so we will see.

"Korea was a great race, and very exciting. I love races like that. It didn't dry up fully but we made a good pit call, the team did a great job - but we are not quite enough at the moment.

"We are struggling with the car in high-speed corners, where it is bottoming a lot. But it is still possible for us to catch these up. I needed a good result like this."