McLaren launch: New car is 'meaty'

The Scot described the revisions featured on the new McLaren at the car's unveiling in Barcelona this morning (Saturday).

"The front area around the pick-up points, the bargeboards are integrated into the suspension, the engine cover is more of a pyramid shape," he explained. "Then there are things that will become apparent like the exhausts from the top body rather than the floor which is the standard in F1 now. It has big old sidepods - it looks meaty, it looks raceable and you can barge your way among other cars and not have bits fall off."

Coulthard admitted that the pressure is on McLaren to make a step up in competitiveness to take on Ferrari and Williams.

"There are pages and pages of areas that the team believes to have been weaknesses," he explained. "On paper, they have been improved. Does it mean car the will be quicker on track? It doesn't, but I would be surprised if it wasn't quicker and frankly it has to be because otherwise we are not going to be competitive. We have not had a regulation change this year and we know Ferrari on balance were slightly quicker than us in 2001, so we have to make a step forward."

He added that the team was more competitive than it showed last year, but was hindered by a variety of problems. "We identified the problems with the car last year that made it a bit inconsistent from circuit to circuit, but we won four GPs with that car and probably could have won more had Mika [Hakkinen] not had that problem on the last lap in Barcelona and other problems. We still would probably not have won the championship but nevertheless we could have been more competitive than the results show."

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