Formula One news

Kovalainen playing the waiting game

Heikki Kovalainen is confident that the McLaren team is constantly making progress, despite admitting that he and World Champion team-mate Lewis Hamilton will have to wait until after the Turkish Grand Prix before making best use of a fully improved performance.

Second in the constructors' championship to Ferrari in 2008, McLaren may be only four points behind their Italian rivals at present, but with a 73-point deficit to leaders Brawn GP after just six races of 2009. "I think we are making progress all the time and since the beginning of the season I think we've made huge progress, but there's obviously still work to be done," Finn Kovalainen said in Istanbul's first press conference of the weekend on Thursday. "We've just got to stay focused and keep on following that same process that we've been doing and eventually it will pay off but it's not easy and it won't happen overnight."

Kovalainen responds to questions in Thursday's press conference

With the high-speed configuration of Hermann Tilke's Istanbul Park, Heikki - who crashed in Monaco last time out - is expecting a generally more challenging weekend than that in Monte-Carlo, with a McLaren MP4-24 which continues to lack downforce. With 'spygate' and the sacking of team manager Dave Ryan at the start of the season, are McLaren now able to concentrate more on the job in hand? "I think we're still focussing on the work, the way that the team has already done for many years," Kovalainen continued, "working with the engineers and with the whole team back in Woking - that's the way we have always been doing it, so I haven't noticed a big difference.

"I think that, at the moment, it's important to just analyse and understand where the main problems are and I think we have already figured out a lot of things that we know need to be corrected and need to be done differently; it will take some time but eventually there's no question that the whole McLaren team will be back on top."

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