Jonathan Neale says McLaren 'on the right track' and hopeful over China upgrades

McLaren's Jonathan Neale says the team do now have a good understanding of the problems affecting the MP4-28 and has expressed confidence it won't be too long before they return to winning ways.

Despite scoring just two points in the opening pair of flyaway races, and already being 38 points behind championship leader Sebastian Vettel, Button insisted last week that the team could work their way into title contention after an encouraging initial step forward in pace in Malaysia. Neale insists the prospect of winning races again isn't too far away for McLaren and is aware that history has certainly shown that teams can recover from poor starts to seasons to challenge for the championship. "It's a long season as everyone knows and here we are in the first half of April and we're going to race through until the end of November," he said. "We've seen in previous years teams start with a car that wasn't on pole position but fight it out for a championship right at the end. "Everything that we're doing here is designed to put us back into, first of all, winning form because we are about winning races - that's why McLaren exists - and I think if we can get on that quickly, and there's no reason at the moment why we can't, we should be fighting through the championship. "It's obviously not an ideal start, we can't shy away from that, but I believe in the team and I believe in this car at the moment. So let's push on and see what happens."