McLaren play down lack of track time

McLaren insist they are not too concerned about the testing time they lost and are likely to run a similar programme in Barcelona to the one they had at Jerez.

Honda's return as McLaren engine supplier didn't go very smooth in the first pre-season test last week with Fernando Alonso and Jenson Button producing only 79 laps between them over the four days.

Everyone at Woking remains optimistic about the MP4-30 though and McLaren's director of engineering Matt Morris says most of the issues they picked up at Jerez have been fixed.

"We’ve had a number of problems, like I say we’ve had some operational issues, just all working as a team together for the first time, things you take for granted when you’ve been with an engine supplier for many years, you sort of drop the ball a little bit sometimes like I say getting oil levels wrong, all these sorts of things, so we’ve had a few issues like that," he is quoted as saying by F1Fanatic.co.uk

"We’ve also had some minor electrical issues again which have resulted in a lot of down time but have actually been relatively easy to fix. So it’s good in a way that they’re easy to fix but frustrating in another way that they sort of hold the car up for so long.

"So the main thing is we’ve not been burning bodywork, we’ve not been blowing engines up so I’m pretty happy that we’re going to come out of this test with no sort of major issues to resolve."

McLaren will get another chance to iron out their problems when the second test kicks off at Barcelona from 19 February.

The team, though, are unlikely to make too many changes to their programme.

"I don't think it’s going to change much at all, really," Morris said. "Like I say the problems that we’ve had have been minor and we've fixed them. Obviously we’ll try and cram as much – because we had a huge programme of aero and set-up work that we’ve just not covered – so we’ll just try and cram as much as we can into that.

"But essentially we have got time to do that so I’m not really concerned about the amount of time we’ve lost."