McLaren believe that Red Bull still have the car to beat heading into this weekend's Turkish Grand Prix.
McLaren engineer believes rivals are between three-tenths and half a second ahead
McLaren believe that Red Bull still have the car to beat heading into this weekend's Turkish Grand Prix.
Defending world champion Sebastian Vettel won the opening two races of the season and although McLaren's Lewis Hamilton hit back in China, the team's principal race engineer Phil Prew believes Red Bull's RB7 still enjoys an advantage worth between three-tenths and half a second per lap.
While hoping that upgrades to McLaren's MP4-26 will help them close the gap in Istanbul, Prew is confident they can at least have a "reasonably strong" weekend.
"I think that we are between three tenths and half a second off the pace of Red Bull and obviously that is the gap that we are aiming to close," he said during a
Vodafone McLaren-Mercedes Phone-In.
"We obviously are hoping to close the gap. We don't have the fastest car at the moment and Red Bull are still the team which we hope to close the gap on. We're adding upgrades to the car in Turkey, which will hopefully help.
"But we have seen over the first three races that the difference between cars varies from track to track. I think Turkey will be a reasonably strong track for our car.
"We need to handle the tyres well and I think we will continue to be competitive. Of course everyone else will be aiming to improve their car at the same time.
"As always, we hope we've done enough."
Sacrifice
With tyre wear now the principal factor in deciding race strategies, Prew also said he doubted that teams would sacrifice a good position on the starting grid in order to save fresh rubber for the race.
After dropping out of the opening session of qualifying in Shanghai three weeks ago, Red Bull's Mark Webber made full use of the softer option tyres he therefore saved to storm through from 18th on the grid to finish third.
Hamilton, meanwhile, made it through to the top-10 qualifying shoot-out, although he made just one flying lap in order to save himself a set of options for the race.
Stopping three times to Vettel's two, he was then able to pass the German for the lead with just four laps to go.
Prew said he thought three stops would again be the ideal this weekend, adding: "The tyre degradation is certainly going to be a large factor in Turkey.
"I think that will certainly be tending towards a three-stop race. There are some benefits of having new tyres available to you, however, I think the competitiveness of the field will force you - pretty much - to run multiple new tyres through qualifying.
"I think our position will be to take qualifying position over having new tyres in the race. I'm not discounting what we did with Lewis, for example, in China.
"We were fortunate enough to get through both Q1 and Q2 with a single set of option tyres, which allowed us to save one set of options.
"But I don't think you would choose not to compete in Q3 for the sake of tyre saving."
