McLaren have done all they can to make Lewis Hamilton’s car as reliable as possible for Sunday’s title-deciding Brazilian Grand Prix, team boss Ron Dennis said on Saturday.
“I can say, whatever the outcome, if our car fails in any shape or form — and obviously I don’t want that to happen — no more effort could have been put into avoiding it,” he told reporters.
“In life you can only do your best, and if that isn’t good enough then you have just got to be able to reflect back and say ‘Is there any more we could have done?’
“I know absolutely categorically now that we couldn’t have done more,” he continued.
“The 0.15 of a second that we have improved the car from the last grand prix to here was the most expensive 10th that we have ever produced.”
“We have thrown everything at this race, and to get that squeezed out after the intensity of our development programme has taken a Herculean effort,” said the Briton.
Hamilton is favourite to become Formula One’s youngest champion in the season-ending race at Interlagos, with a seven point lead over Ferrari’s local hero Felipe Massa.
However the 23-year-old, who starts fourth on Sunday while Massa is on pole, allowed Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen to overcome a similar deficit in Brazil when he was a rookie last season.
McLaren have not won a title since Mika Hakkinen’s second championship in 1999 and the Mercedes-powered team are determined not to miss out yet again.
Dennis said the team had used the two weeks since the Chinese Grand Prix, won by Hamilton, to run every possible scenario through their computers and re-analyse every part of the car.
Mercedes motorsport head Norbert Haug said the German manufacturer had built an identical engine to that in Hamilton’s car, using parts from exactly the same batches as those in his current unit, and run it for 1,500km in the factory.
Hamilton is using his engine for the second race in a row but Haug and Dennis said there were no concerns about any of the parts.
“It has been a phenomenally detailed and focused effort to try and get the most reliability we can out of the team,” said Dennis.
“We can’t have made it (the car) faster or put more effort into making it more reliable, or into trying to accommodate whatever the race throws at us tomorrow.”
“If we fail, you will be very critical — especially as I have set myself up.”
“But the one thing we won’t be doing is going away from here saying ‘we screwed up’ because we could not have put more effort into it.”