McLaren team principal Martin Whitmarsh has insisted that the Woking team would not want Lewis Hamilton to change his approach to the sport for 2012, despite his string of on-track incidents in 2011 that ruined his season.
Hamilton endured one of his least-impressive Formula One seasons to date in 2011, after suffering a string of on-track clashes throughout the year.
The crashes put Hamilton under pressure to improve his form, after team mate Jenson Button finished ahead of him in the final championship standings.
But while Whitmarsh has insisted that the 2011 season was "tough" for Hamilton at times, he does not believe that the team wants their driver to change his aggressive approach to racing.
"Lewis won three Grands Prix in 2011 - one of only three drivers to have won more than a single race," he pointed out in an interview with the official F1 website recently.
He went on: "Indeed, some of the most compelling highlights of last season's on-track action - from the point of view of a racer’s sheer talent shining through - were provided by Lewis.
"In China, in Germany and in Abu Dhabi - and in many other places besides - he was awesomely impressive."
But along with his questionable attempts to pain Hamilton's 2011 season as the 'season of his life', Whitmarsh added that: "Undoubtedly there’s some truth in [saying it was a tough season].
"Such is the level of his ambition that he's his own sternest critic. Sometimes, therefore, when things don’t go quite right for him, he lets it get to him.
"But it's a measure of his competitiveness, a side-effect of his monumental will to win. As such, we wouldn’t want Lewis any other way."
He also downplayed the team's decision to give Button, and not Hamilton, the first taste of their new MP4-27 car at next month's opening pre-season test in Jerez.
Button, who became the first-ever team mate of Hamilton's to beat him in the championship, will get the first two days in the car, with Hamilton driving in the final two days.
"As you'd expect, with pre-season testing as restricted as it is nowadays, our race drivers will be doing as much as they can," he rambled.
"We’re fortunate that we have two world champions in our driver line-up - a claim that can be made by no other team - and McLaren's ethos has always been, and remains, to treat both its drivers as equal number-ones.
"That's what we’ve always done, that's what we’ll do this year, and as long as I'm around that’s what we'll always do."
And he insisted: "It just so happens that our pre-season testing schedule has Jenson driving on the first day and Lewis on the second day, but it could just as easily have been the other way around."
McLaren will launch their new car on Wednesday this week, ahead of the start of testing on February 7th.
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