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Whitmarsh won't walk away from McLaren

Martin Whitmarsh: "I'm not considering anything other than getting this team back to where it belongs" © Getty Images

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Martin Whitmarsh has said he is not considering his future as McLaren team principal despite another poor start to a season.

Having begun 2013 with a difficult car, McLaren was hoping to make a step forward with its upgrades for the Spanish Grand Prix. With little progress made with the new parts Whitmarsh was reminded of McLaren's performance under his tenure and - with no championships in over four years so far - asked if he knew if the board was considering his future or if he had done so himself.

"No, I don't believe it's being considered at board level at the moment as far as I know," Whitmarsh said. "I believe in the team, I believe that we're going to power through this, so no I'm not considering anything other than getting this team back to where it belongs. I've been around in the sport for a long time, I think I've sat on stools here in difficult moments, dark moments and I've sat here in good moments as well.

"I enjoy going motor racing, I enjoy coming to motor racing to win, so I don't like it when you come with a car that's not good enough to win, that's for sure. But I've been around when we've won more than 100 races personally and I'm sure we're going to win some more races; we're going to work hard to do that this year."

Whitmarsh did admit that McLaren's troubles were likely to stem from an over optimistic approach to the car design.

"The simulation before the start of the season was over optimistic and we had poor correlation, although I think often when you look back on it and are really honest with yourself there was some will to believe data and to interpret data in a more positive way than it really was.

"I think the simulation coming here was more modest in expectation. We hoped that we would find more performance than the simulation and if you want to take some positives out of the weekend - and I think you can always take positives out of every weekend - there is a better correlation, but clearly we haven't made a step forward that we need and want to make.

"We're still learning. We gave our two drivers a different car [on Friday], we gave them another different car [on Saturday] because we made quite a lot of changes overnight and in Checo's case we had problems in [FP3]. So it's been pretty difficult for the guys, we haven't given them performance. I think we're learning, we've got to carry on working hard; we've still got a reasonable amount of homework to do to study what we've got here and we've got a reasonable amount of work to improve the car, that's very clear. I think we're starting to get that understanding, we've just got to work hard, develop the car, make it quicker and that's what we aim to do."

© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.