McLaren to increase focus on qualifying

Although both Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button showed in Bahrain that the race pace of the MP4-25 is a match for its rivals, the team was left on the back foot by being more than one second off the pole position time in qualifying for the season opener.

Both McLaren drivers think that they must spend more time working on their single lap pace.

"Definitely, because our race pace is not too bad and our understanding of the car felt pretty good in the race," said Hamilton. "I think clearly the most important part for us is to get the qualifying sorted - understand how to get the most out of the car on that single lap and clearly the qualifying position perhaps has more of an impact that it did in the past."

Hamilton said that the team has been flat out at its Woking factory to try and understand why its form in qualifying was so different to its race pace.

"In the simulator, we are trying to work on the car, work on the set-up, trying to understand exactly how the car is different from heavy fuel to light fuel and
clearly we have another Friday now - each Friday you learn more and more - but this Friday we are definitely a step ahead of where we were the last Friday test," he said.

"So we'll continue doing the same programme probably but try to really extract maybe more from two runs or the first two sessions to understand how to warm up the tyres, making sure the tyre temperatures are perfect."

World champion Button added: "I think we maybe concentrated more on the race pace than on qualifying, but that's not all of it. With the downforce level we had, we couldn't get the best out of the car in qualifying and we couldn't get the tyres in the right working range. But in the race we could, and the balance was much better.

"It's a big margin in qualifying. It was a very strange qualifying, it was very windy. We weren't on the pace and it's an area we definitely need to improve on. This is a lower downforce circuit - Bahrain ended up being Monaco downforce, whereas we didn't come with that. So it was tricky in qualifying to get the best out of it.

"If you compare Lewis [Hamilton] to Sebastian [Vettel], it was 1.1 seconds, which shocked us - a big, big shock. I think it shocked a lot of people, even Ferrari, to have the Red Bull on pole. Our strong points were high speed, in the low speed we struggled a little bit compared to those two cars. But I think here we will be a lot more competitive. In the simulator we're looking forward to it, I'm looking forward to driving here."