McLaren Chief Ron Dennis has said his team has decided to forget this year’s World Championship in favour of focussing its energies on the 2003 crown.

The Woking marque by its standards has had a woeful start to the year, its MP4/17-Mercedes a sluggish and unreliable contender compared to the machines of Williams and Ferrari.

After just six rounds the team is already 36 points behind second placed Williams in the manufacturer standings, and 52 behind leader Ferrari.

Dennis told the UK weekly “Motorsport News”, that development would still be carried out on the current car, but there were technical boundaries with it, which made working on the 2003 MP4/18 more sensible.

‘We've got our race-by-race approach, with all sorts of developments but we also have to appreciate that, as with any season, the die is cast (with the current car’s development),’ he said. ‘So while incremental change will give us results, it's not going to win us the world championship.’

‘We have to make a quantum leap forward to succeed next year. We are already spending a significant amount of time on planning for next year to try and get ourselves in a position to jump back to the front.’

McLaren’s last victory was Mika Hakkinen’s success at Indianapolis last September.