McLaren boss Martin Whitmarsh has said that the MP4-26 may be competetive!! It cant be Martin, he told BBC "Do I think we head into the weekend as favourites? No, But do I feel that we have the capacity to surprise people and be competitive? Very much so." Now this has come as a shock to many people, as McLaren promissed in testing that they were NOT sand bagging (going slow on purpos) during testing. Its seems like they may have been lieing a bit there. The McLaren MP4-26 has been disappointing during testing this year, and the team being left 11th on total mileage completed by all the F1 teams' new cars - just infront of Hispania Racing's challenger, which will not run until practice in Australia. Whitmarsh said: "Over the winter, we set ourselves some extremely ambitious performance targets for MP4-26. We are an uncompromising team and, as with every car we build, we tend to push development to the limit. In some cases, we've pushed over those limits, and the resulting lack of mileage has invariably eaten into our pre-season preparation."
