McLaren’s drivers have admitted the urgency of eating back into Fernando Alonso’s increasingly big championship lead.<\/p>\n
After ten races – or half of the 2012 schedule – the Ferrari driver is leading his Red Bull rivals by at least 34 points.<\/p>\n
Even Lotus’ Kimi Raikkonen has more points than McLaren’s highest-ranked driver, Lewis Hamilton, while Jenson Button is a huge 86 points behind.<\/p>\n
Told it appears ‘quite urgent’ for him to react, the 2009 world champion admitted: “Yes, it is.<\/p>\n
“It’s a massive gap to Fernando.\u00a0 Fernando and Ferrari have done an amazing job over the last few races and I know how difficult it is to come back from there,” Button told F1’s official website.<\/p>\n
Even Hamilton, who is a further 24 points up the road, agrees, insisting that his bad outing at Hockenheim a week ago was a championship “dent”.<\/p>\n
“It was as big a dent as you could probably take, just as Valencia was,” he said.<\/p>\n
“There are only a certain amount of dents that you can take through the year, especially when the guy who is leading has finished every race in the points.”<\/p>\n
Every driver in the FIA press conference on Thursday – Narain Karthikeyan, Kamui Kobayashi, Heikki Kovalainen, Kimi Raikkonen and Pastor Maldonado – named Alonso as the obvious championship favourite.<\/p>\n
The Spaniard trotted out the obvious line about not counting any chickens, but reporters did manage to get him to imagine winning his third drivers’ title.<\/p>\n
“When we finished Brazil in 2006, it was a dream for me to win three world championships in my career,” he said in Hungary.<\/p>\n
“To have the same as Ayrton (Senna) had … he was my idol or my reference when I was in go-karts and there’s some other big names, Lauda etcetera, so three is a pretty good number and hopefully it arrives sooner rather than later,” added Alonso.<\/p>\n
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