McLaren Boss Martin Whitmarsh said his team will be running the rear-blown diffuser for the rest of the German Grand Prix despite mixed results during practice on Friday.
The Woking-based outfit had planned to do extensive testing of the new floor, exhaust system, and heat shield, but these plans were damaged by poor weather conditions and Lewis Hamilton spinning his car into the tyre wall in the opening session.
Although this meant that both Hamilton and his team-mate Jenson Button were unable to make a real impact on the timing sheets during practice two, Whitmarsh believes that there was enough improvement to continue running the upgrades.
"Based on the data we will be running it," said Whitmarsh.
"The problem with today in a sense is that, with the limited running we had, it was difficult for the driver to go out and say this is the way to go. So you have to rely on data.
"Unless something else has come to fruition, which I don't think it has, we should have the confidence that this floor will do everything we expected it to or most of what we expected it to."
Whitmarsh admitted the Hamilton's crash had impeded their progress, but said they were lucky because rival teams were also struggling due to the weather.
"We lost a little bit, but on the other hand it was a bit of a scrappy day for everyone wasn't it?" said Whitmarsh.
"When those things happen, which they do periodically and if they don't then people aren't trying hard enough, then if it is a wonderful dry consistent and progressively slowly improving track you miss out on doing all the homework.
He added that it was Hamilton's decision to finish the session on the hard tyres.
"And actually I have to congratulate Lewis. He was getting out there late. I was niggling the engineer to say, have a run and then come back and do an option at the end, and it was actually Lewis's discipline that said in that limited time 'I just want to do one run on the prime tyre'. He said 'I know when I put the options on it will be quicker, so I don't need to prove it'.
"I spoke to Lewis just now and congratulated him on his discipline because I would probably have tickled him into doing a late run on the option tyre."
Copyright 2010 AFP Global Edition
