Q & A with McLaren's Jonathan Neale

But the the team is still determined to continue working to match Red Bull's pace.

AUTOSPORT heard from McLaren's managing director Jonathan Neale on the team's progress and more.

Q. Is there a plan to re-introduce the radical exhaust system shelved prior to Australia and is there now a need for it given the effectiveness of the solution applied in Melbourne?

Jonathan Neale: I'm going to decline to comment on our future engineering and development plans and where we are going in terms of development, but what I will say is that as with most years you've got a number of teams working on different aspects of the car.

There are a whole range of interesting features out there and every team at everybody else. That was as true two years ago as it was last year with the double diffuser. Typically we always want to explore and try and understand why a team has gone in a specific direction, particularly if they are quick. That is just the natural cycle.

But I think you will find over the next few races that there are a number of teams evaluating exhaust systems because it would appear that there is some performance there.

Q. Mclaren appears to have work to do to match Red Bull's performance, are there areas of your car that you are particularly happy with?

JN: Not until we are on the front row of the grid. I think you are right in your first assessment in that we don't think we necessarily had the quickest car out there, and we are working very hard over the next few races to try and make sure that Lewis (Hamilton) and Jenson (Button) can qualify on the front row.

I think there is still a reasonable amount of work to do. There are some areas of the car that we are satisfied with, but clearly at this stage it is all about how we exploit the tyres and we get the downforce on the car.

Q. What worries McLaren the most ahead of Malaysia, the heat, the tyres or the chance of rain?

JN: Rain is probably the honest answer to that. Last year Ferrari and ourselves found us in P22-23, which is always very uncomfortable for a Saturday evening. We are going to be running when there is a high possibility of rain which will make it interesting for the spectators and very stressful for us teams.

It will be interesting to see how the Pirelli tyres work in the rain. We had some experience with torrential rain in Barcelona through the winter testing, but we haven't really done much running on the inters yet. But that is the same for everybody. At least the one thing we can see is that regardless of what the conditions are, we've all got to go through them.

Q. Button said after Australia that he felt McLaren's KERS was more effective than Red Bulls. Do you agree?

JN: I'm not sure that he would know about Red Bull's KERS. Certainly I don't know anything about its system. I think from the basis of Mercedes Benz, which builds our system, with an extra 12 months of experience compared to others then there should be advantages to do with systems intergration and packaging. But that is a very difficult thing to quantify because we don't have any comparative information.

I think the one thing that we are all looking for at this stage is to make sure that our cars are reliable as possible. Of course with the increase in complexity comes the risk of poorer reliability. So we are fighting very hard to make sure that we have the aerodynamic performance that we are looking for but making sure that the underlying systems are also reliable.

Q. Do you think that Australia offered a realistic picture of performance and were there any other teams that surprised you in terms of performance or lack there-of?

JN: We were pleased with the performance of our car even though we didn't win the race. That was a confidence boost for us. We are not for one minute thinking that we have seen the best of Ferrari or Mercedes at this stage. We watched each other carefully through winter testing and I am absolutely sure that both of those teams have more to bring.

In terms of the nature of the circuit, once you get to venue like Malaysia with much hotter track temperatures and certainly circuits like Barcelona which are pretty challenging, they will test the cars more fully.

Q. There has been a fair bit of speculation over certain drivers' futures already, when will McLaren start looking at the long-term succession of their drivers?

JN: That is one of those things that goes on continuously behind the scenes but we don't choose to talk about it very much. When we were having the conversations with Jenson, we would rather have come out at a point where we could say: 'This is what we are doing' rather than 'This is what we think might happen'. Just anticipating your question, I think the fact that some teams are speculating that it would be good to have Lewis [Hamilton] drive for them, I don't think that is particularly newsworthy. We would feel the same way if he wasn't driving us, I think he is pretty good.

Q. Based on what we saw in Melbourne, what changes need to be made to the DRS parameters?

JN: Paddy [Lowe] works pretty closely with the FIA and some of the other technical directors at the moment to make sure that we get the position at which to deploy it right. Malaysia has a good straight so we can really see how these things will work, but we have been surprised and pleased at the drag reduction system in Australia because it didn't make overtaking very easy but there was an ability there for the drivers to attack under some circumstances. I don't think at this stage that it needs root and branch overhaul we just need to work with the FIA to refine it now.