McLaren driver Lewis Hamilton is well placed to bounce back in the 2012 Formula One season after his disappointing and error-strewn 2011 campaign, according to the team's ever-confident managing director Jonathan Neale.
Hamilton faces pressure to return to form in 2012, after enduring arguably his worst F1 season to date last year.
The 2008 champion was beaten by team mate Jenson Button in the championship, and was involved in a string of contentious collisions throughout the year.
He has vowed to get back on track for the new season, as he aims to take the fight to Red Bull, and Neale has expressed his confidence in Hamilton's ability to do that.
"He's getting himself together," Neale was quoted as saying by the BBC Sport website, "He's winter training really hard and he's in the right place doing the things he needs to be doing."
He added: "What he needs to do is get himself in the car. He's only got something to prove to himself. He's his own biggest critic.
"He puts extremely high demands on himself, we at the team are here to support him. It's a tough business, you've got to get the job done."
He also said that the team was not prepared to play it safe with their 2012 car, despite struggling with their aggressive 2011 design in the early part of the year.
"We're in the business of taking controlled risk," he bragged to the Autosport website, "F1 is not a business where you can afford to relax at any moment of time."
He added: "If you don't keep that relentless pressure of development up, you go backwards. Red Bull, Ferrari, ourselves and Mercedes have, over the years, got quite good at that development."
And Neale admitted that there was frustration within the Woking team over their lack of title successes in recent F1 history.
Despite producing a string of race-winning cars over the last decade and a half, the team has not secured the constructors title since their success in 1998.
Meanwhile, Hamilton's 2008 success remains their only drivers title since Mika Hakkinen's success in 1999.
"We are frustratingly just shy of that drumbeat of winning championships," he grumbled.
"Of course, winning matters most, both in races and championships. We've been there or thereabouts and McLaren should be fighting for a championship each year."
He added: "We stumbled badly last year and got into some reliability issues with the car, maybe we took too big a bite on some things that we paid dearly for."
As for 2012, he suggested that along with new F1 kings Red Bull, Ferrari would likely also be a force to be reckoned with once again.
"Ferrari have obviously got a lot to prove this year," he mused.
Referring to 2012's ban on blown diffusers, he added: "From the glimpse we got of how their car was at Silverstone without the blown diffuser they were quick, so they have some capability there.
"But the whole car hangs together well for Red Bull and, with an evolutionary set of rules, they would be disappointed if they weren't among the front runners."
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