By Parminio
March 2 2003

With several different teams breaking track records, who's for real and who isn't? It's so hard to tell as some teams are impressing sponsors, or trying to attract new ones. You have Jaguar, Williams, McLaren and Ferrari breaking track records in testing this pre-season. Well, that's fine..but remembering last year, McLaren broke 3 track records only to come up WAY short for the whole first half of the season.

Starting with the MP4-17D should give McLaren an advantage over Williams. Williams have reportedly had several problems with the FW25...although Ralph broke the Jerez track record just this past week. Ferrari's new F2003GA seems to be faster...but the 2002 has been faster on at least one instance, so one wonders if the F2003 times are a bit padded to make the investors feel good. The hope for McLaren is that the 2003 still has a ways to go.

Time for time so far this pre-season, McLaren have shown well..not only against Williams new contender, but against the F2002 as well. On the average McLaren are only down about half a second at most...coming from being down nearly 2 seconds last year.

With qualifying being so different this year, strategy will have a great deal to do with who comes out on top. Our hopes of course lie with the fact that reliablility should be on our side over Williams, but there is still Renault, BAR and Jag to consider. No one really expects Toyota to suddenly contend, but considering that their first race ever last year saw them fighting for points at the end of the race gives one food for thought.

In the end, we'll have to wait and see...but this McLaren fan feels that we're sitting pretty. My personal prediction is that we'll get a podium out of it. Provided of course that the MP4-17D doesn't suffer the reliability demons that Austrailia has provided for us over the last couple of years.