Hamilton happy to have car to contend

Lewis Hamilton admits he is just glad to be heading into the first grand prix knowing McLaren has a competitive car this year, even if the team isn't yet sure where it stands in the pecking order. The Briton knew even before he started the defence of the world championship in 2009 that in normal conditions he was going to be unable to challenge at the front of the field in the early races, with the MP4-24 having proved massively off the pace in testing. However, on the back of an impressive development surge last year McLaren has developed a 2010 car that has proved to be amongst the front-runners from the off during pre-season leaving Hamilton confident that he will at least be starting this season in the thick of the front-running action. The beginning of last season wasn't too exciting for us, he told reporters in Bahrain on Thursday. We had a lot of work to do to really catch up and we were a long way behind. But this year the team has really done a great job obviously what we learnt last year has carried on into this year and we are in a much stronger position. Without doubt we have still got a lot of work to do, but it's nice to be here knowing that we can be competitive from the start. While Hamilton set the fastest time of the week at the final pre-season test at Barcelona as the leading teams finally tried out low-fuel qualifying simulations, the 25-year-old is still cautious about predicting how the MP4-25 compares to its rival's challengers. The car is competitive¦[but]you're not sure what the others are doing, whether they are holding back or what they are doing, he said. We really have no idea. We know we feel comfortable in the car, we feel it's good but other people have got good cars too. But although the Briton admitted it was probably safe to assume that all of the grid's four world champions would feature in the title fight, he feels other teams and drivers could also feature prominently during the season. Clearly we have got four world champions so we have to assume that the world champions are going to be up there fighting for the championship, Hamilton added. But we still have people like Force India, [with] Adrian Sutil, we have Sauber, we have Williams¦so, really, who knows. We are going to find out tomorrow [in Friday practice] how things set off and we will get a much better understanding from tomorrow onwards.