Adrian Newey has said that the progress made by McLaren is down to the team copying Red Bull's exhaust system.
McLaren looked to be well off the pace in pre-season testing, but abandoned its complex exhaust design for a much simpler one and became Red Bull's closest challenger in Melbourne. While acknowledging the impressive progress made by McLaren, Newey said Red Bull should take some credit.
"McLaren made a huge leap forward - by copying our exhaust, it has to be said," Newey said. "But the bottom line is they still made huge leaps forward. I am sure they will be pushing us hard. We think it (the exhaust) works for us. It seems it also works for McLaren. It's a form of flattery but it's a bit of a pain if they then beat you with it."
Newey also said that the team would try its best to run KERS in Malaysia, after scrapping the system in Melbourne due to "trivial" reliability issues.
"If we feel it's reliable then we will try to race it," he said. "We will have to make that decision on Friday evening (in Malaysia). KERS is a benefit off the start line. So even if you are on the front row, without KERS there's a risk that you won't be first into the first corner."
"It's not really a packaging problem as such. We have packaged it in quite an aggressive manner but that wasn't the cause of the problem. It was actually a relatively trivial problem but KERS is a complicated system, we have been trying to develop the element of it that has been giving us a bit of trouble ourselves and we're not experts in that field."
With Red Bull comfortably quickest in Australia even without KERS, there is a big deficit for the chasing teams to close. Nico Rosberg said that Mercedes were already focussing on bettering themselves rather than attempting to beat Red Bull.
"We have to say that Sebastian [Vettel] and Red Bull are far ahead of everyone," he told Sport Bild. "In the chasing field, we want to play a serious role and improve on our fourth place of last year."
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