McLaren to unveil car next month

Eurosport - Tue, 02 Dec 13:13:00 2008

The car Lewis Hamilton will use to defend his Formula One title next year will be unveiled by McLaren on January 16 at their Woking factory.

McLaren are the third team to announce a launch date.

Toyota will be revealing their new car on January 15 while BMW-Sauber take the wraps off theirs in Valencia on January 20.

While McLaren and Mercedes engineers busily prepare for the 2009 season in Woking, Brixworth and Stuttgart and the test team readies two cars for December outings at Jerez and the new Autodromo Internacional do Algarve circuit in Portugal, Hamilton and team-mates Heikki Kovalainen, Pedro de la Rosa and Gary Paffett will head to western Finland for a five-day pre-season training camp at the Kuortane Sports Institute.

The centre has helped train some of the world's top athletes and Hamilton acknowledges that, not only does it provide the McLaren team with a useful distraction from the usual pressures of F1, but it also acts as a useful team-building exercise with mechanics and engineers joining the drivers for group exercises and tests on the Kuortane campus.

"Travelling to Finland for our winter training camp is one of the best weeks of the year for me," the Briton admitted.

"It feels like you're miles from anywhere and totally cut off from the outside world. It allows me to focus solely on my training, which is great.

"It's certainly not an easy week. Finland in the winter is cold and icy and we're pushed hard for day after day. We spend the first part of the week doing tests to monitor our core strength and flexibility and spend the rest of the time building on specific exercises that will help us once we're back in the car.

"After Brazil, it's good to get a proper rest because it's the one time of the year when you can relax your training a little - but Finland is when it all starts again in earnest."