McLaren facing a difficult start of 2015 - Boullier

As pre-season winter testing has come to an end, McLaren looks back on a troubled 12 days, admitting the team will face a difficult start to the season.

On the final day at Barcelona, McLaren Honda had a slow start to the morning, but Jenson Button managed to put some laps on the board during the day. While the test programme has been largely affected by unreliability, and by a lack of running, the team is confident there is "plenty of optimism that the performance foundations for the partnership are strong, and that development will continue strongly".

"Looking back at the last four weeks, our winter test programme has been difficult", commented Eric Boullier, Racing Director at McLaren Honda.

"However, that wasn’t entirely unexpected: this time last year, we saw many teams in a similar situation when they introduced new power units for the first time. This year, we also had the added complexity that very tight packaging brings.

"In overview, the lack of mileage means we won’t be as ready as we’d have liked, but we can take away the positive that all the running and data gathering we’ve done have confirmed that we’re achieving the targets we set ourselves.

"Even if it’s likely to be a difficult start to the season, we know we can develop hard and fast, and that we’ll surely unlock the huge potential that lies within the McLaren-Honda MP4-30.”