McLaren will win this year ... there is little doubt about that. But the fact is that the usually mighty West McLaren Mercedes team is struggling at the moment to get close to the Ferraris, or to be on par with the Williams BMWs and even the Renaults. What's gone wrong?

Why is it that after five races the McLaren Mercedes team has scored just over one-fifth of the points Ferrari has and just over one-quarter of the points garnered by Williams BMW? Why is it that Renault and Sauber are snapping at McLaren's heels in the points table in the Constructors Championship?

Mercedes-Benz racing chief Norbert Haug sums it all up pretty succinctly: "All in all, we did not win because we are not reliable enough and because we were not fast enough and we need too improve."

Last year, David Coulthard won twice and finished in the top six in all of the first six races. One of those victories came in the Austrian Grand Prix, but it's going to take a bit of luck to win again in Austria this weekend. So far this season he's scored two third places and one sixth.

	“	We need to improve and improve everywhere.”
		—Norbert Haug

"Clearly the year hasn't started the way any of us had expected," Coulthard said. "We have been less competitive for a number of reasons and we are working through those in a logical way, in the same way that McLaren have struggled in the past and managed to get back to become a dominant force. But there is a long way to go."

McLaren switched from Bridgestone tires to Michelins this year, and the team admits that it is taking a while to adapt the car to the different characteristics of the Michelins.

"We switched to Michelins probably a month into the conception of the car," McLaren director Ron Dennis said. "And there are some elements of the car that with the benefit of running on the tires through the winter we would probably have changed, and which would have probably given us the ability to handle the tire in a slightly more advantageous way. To quantify it would be impossible, but we just know for example that some aspects of the geometry of the suspension are not optimized for the ratio of front and rear tire."

The flip side of all this is that Ferrari stayed with its well-known Bridgestones. While Bridgestone strives to provide great tires for all its F1 teams, it naturally wants to give Ferrari the optimum tire to suit the Ferrari chassis as the team is by far Bridgestone's best chance of winning. And right now the Bridgestones are working in perfect harmony with the Ferrari.

You can split a car's performance into three major parts: tires, chassis and engine. Dennis refuses to blame one particular sector or to even apportion out the blame to all three on a percentage basis.

Are tires the key?

"Absolutely not," Dennis says. "It is just one factor where we know we could do a better job."

The team bristles at suggestions that the Mercedes V10 is down on power. But the engine is definitely a contributing factor.

"It certainly doesn't look to be the strongest of the engines," muses Williams Technical Director Patrick Head, "but equally it can't be that bad. There are going to be some races, Monaco and others where they will be strong, and equally I'd expect that the engine was going to improve over the year. But we are dealing with the highest stratosphere with cars, and to say that the Mercedes is a bad engine is not really correct. It is all relative when you are looking at the top level."

The Mercedes engine revealed problems in the season opener not seen in winter testing.

"We were running the engine very conservatively (in pre-season) testing because we were in the development phase of the engine," Dennis says. "We didn't really run the engine to its full rev parameters until we started in Australia. That created some problems in itself, but again, are those problems indicative of the one reason why we are not winning races? No."

	David Coulthard was third at Brazil, but has yet to win in 2002.

Norbert Haug says that the engineers are coming up with improvements on the engine at every race.

"What we read and hear about the engine has not necessarily been the truth," he says. "I am not sitting here and saying that our horsepower is so strong. We try to make small or big steps from race to race. But we will not announce it because it doesn't make a lot of sense. The whole package has to work, and it is really important to understand that."

Part of the package is the chassis and its aerodynamics.

"The aerodynamics of the car we think are quite good," Dennis says. "Why can't you quantify quite good versus very good versus bad? It's impossible. You are comparing your aerodynamic performance against your own values, and you don't know if anyone passes you or surpasses those values. You just have incremental improvement through the seasons. Every single year we have made positive and measurable improvements on the aerodynamics of the car."

McLaren's technical Director Adrian Newey -- who came so close to switching camps a year ago when his close friend Bobby Rahal offered him a post at Jaguar Racing -- is one of the most highly regarded people in his field. He says that learning all about the Michelin tires this year is part of a long-term strategy.

"For sure we are going through a learning curve on how to best use the Michelin tires," Newey says. "It is something we went into with our eyes open. We knew that was likely to be the case and how it would pan out this year was kind of unknown but it was from my point of view very much the intention of it being a long-term strategy and we wanted to make a few changes this year that will hopefully put us in a stronger position next year."

Coulthard or his icy-cool and very fast teammate Kimi Raikkonen could win this weekend's Austrian Grand Prix. But that's far from a sure thing. Haug sums it all up again.

"The true story is that we just were not quick enough," he says. "The reality is that we are faced with a very dominant Ferrari/Bridgestone combination. They have the best package. We need to improve and improve everywhere."