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McLaren to Build New Car for 2004

McLaren-Mercedes chairman Ron Dennis has dismissed speculation that his team will not produce a new MP4-19 car in 2004 after the delays to the introduction of their new MP4-18 machine this year.

McLaren-Mercedes chairman Ron Dennis has dismissed speculation that his team will not produce a new MP4-19 car in 2004 after the delays to the introduction of their new MP4-18 machine this year.

The Woking-based team are currently using a development of last year's MP4-17 while they wait for the new car, which was not even fully designed at the start of this year, to prove its reliability in testing.

It was expected to be introduced at the Canadian Grand Prix earlier this month but will now not make its race debut until at least the British Grand Prix at Silverstone in two races time.

The delays have prompted some observers to speculate that the team would not now introduce a new machine for 2004 but Dennis insisted there is still a performance advantage to gain by doing so.

"We took the decision this week that there will be a 19 for next year," said Dennis. "The definition of that car will be determined during the course of the next few weeks. So there will be a 19, most definitely."

The introduction of the new car has been severely hampered by the back-to-back races at the Nurburgring, this weekend, and at Magny Cours in France next weekend.

McLaren will test the machine in Barcelona after the French Grand Prix and Dennis said: "The next test is critical and we will be very careful with the evaluation of what we did.

"The next racing milestone is Silverstone, but there are definitely no pressures from anybody other than the media to race the car. Our objective is to go to every race with the best chance of winning it.

"The pressures are more towards taking a cautious approach to its race introduction and that's probably the way we will take the decisions as and when they arrive."

But Dennis is also concerned about the testing break in the middle of this season, which will now last for seven weeks after the removal of the Belgian Grand Prix from the calendar.

The Barcelona test will give McLaren just one chance to prove that the new car, which has crashed twice due to driver error during previous tests, is reliable enough to race at the British Grand Prix.

If not, they will have just one more chance to test before the break and Dennis, who backed the mid-season break when it was introduced, said the changes to the calendar have put his team in a difficult situation.

"The original concept, as originally implemented, was that this window of break would be the Monday after the GP preceding the three-week break until the Monday after the next GP," said Dennis.

"The evolutionary process of how that agreement has been written sees this year a 7-week break, and that is extremely disruptive to our testing programme at a time when we would like to do more."

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