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McLaren believes that some of its problems this season were caused by its 2012 car "overdelivering" towards the end of last year.

Speaking in an exclusive interview with AUTOSPORT, team principal Martin Whitmarsh said that the combination of the 2012 car overperforming compared to its windtunnel model and the 2013 car underperforming led to McLaren losing its way at the start of this year.

"Sometimes you're lucky in life and you stick all the elements together and they add up," said Whitmarsh. "Sometimes they just don't.

"There were times when it's come good and we don't really know why.

"At the end of last year, some of the developments overperformed. We were actually overdelivering at the track.

Whitmarsh uncut: how Mclaren went off-course



"That was another thing that caused this: we're always looking at the correlation between full-scale windtunnel and CFD, and there's always an offset between those, and we work on that.

"That was another thing that has exacerbated this situation. The real [2012] car was actually better than the windtunnel [model]."

For the full interview with Whitmarsh, where he explains in detail how McLaren went from the front of the field to scrapping to get into the top 10, click here.