The 24-year-old world champion admits the Woking squad, which has scored just 13 points in eight races so far this year, faces a tough job to recover its perennial front-running position, but says everyone in the team is determined to ensure itstorrid 2009 isn't repeated.
When I m talking about next year, we have a tough job on our hands and we have a lot of pressure on our hands, he said. We have to work as a team to make sure we have the best car and when we get there next year we want to be winning every race, so that s what we re all working for and that s what we are all hopeful for.
Clearly everyone else [rival teams] is going to do a great job as well, but we just have to make sure we don t have a tough year like this again. Hamilton, yet to finish higher than fourth and without a point in the past four races, is currently enduring the worst season for a defending world champion since Britain s previous title winner Damon Hill scored just seven points all year at Arrows in 1997.
He concedes he is unlikely to drastically improve his position in the drivers standings over the second half of the season,although reckons some progress will be possible if McLaren can at least return to the points positions on a regular basis. When asked if he had a target position in the drivers standings he felt he could reach over the final nine races, he said:
We aim to win so as high up as we can get. I think I am P11 in the championship right now, which is new for us, and with the way we are going, not scoring any points, then that s kind of where we are going to be. But bit by bit if we can begin to start scoring one, two or three more points per race then slowly we will climb back up the standings but I m not sure whether we will get up into the top five with the pace that we have. Although the team has fallen well short of its expectations with its MP4-24, Hamilton s team-mate Heikki Kovalainen believes the struggle has allowed the whole team to improve its working practices in regard to developing its cars. The team is systematically looking at the data and we [drivers and test drivers] spend quite a lot more time this year with the actual designers of the car, with the aerodynamicists and the designers, he said.
They tell us what they are thinking and then we try to describe to them what we need from the car. So these kind of conversations we are having much more than last year, trying to put all the effort in that we can. It s a good learning [experience] for all of us and a good wake-up for everybody we can do much more and we are getting much more information this year. There is no question we will make a corner and turn again towards winning ways but it s a long way and it s a hard times now, but no one is giving up.
Hamilton adds that although a breakthrough has remained elusive with the troublesome car, the team has continued to work as tirelessly as ever and will continue to introduce further improvements. We re all [drivers, engineers and mechanics] just as committed as ever before, but I think unfortunately the error was made a long time ago not that it was an error but the unfortunate route that we took happened a long time ago and it s kind of undoable, he added. But we will continue to make changes to this car, but as you can see when we were in Barcelona in week 11 we were two seconds off [the pace]. We are pretty much in the same spot, very, very similar maybe a second and a half [behind the front] but we are still in the same position because everybody else look at the Red Bulls who have made another step forward and gained another good half a second [at Silverstone].
Source: ITV
