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WORLD champion Lewis Hamilton believes it’s only a matter of time before his McLaren team rediscovers its winning formula.

The Surrey-based team have endured a dismal opening half of the F1 season, picking up just 13 points from the first eight races.

But Hamilton, who lines up for this weekend’s German Grand Prix a full 55 points behind fellow Brit Jenson Button in the championship race, is confident his McLaren team are making strides in the right direction.

“I’d say that from every race we learn more and more,” Hamilton said after a practice session at the Nurburgring yesterday. “We’re trying to focus on this year and understanding where the car’s faults are and where we can make it better. It would be good if we had testing, but we don’t. The race weekends are our three day tests and we learn more and more about it.”

While this season has been a learning curve in Hamilton’s fledgling career, the 24-year-old is calling on his McLaren engineers to understand the reasons behind the underperforming car to take into next year’s campaign.

He added: “If we understood it now we would fix it and we would be winning races, and we would have all the updates and everything by now. But we’re not far away, I think, from understanding it. We’ll just have to wait and see.

“I definitely don’t want to take this year’s car into next year’s car, but we definitely need to understand where and why it went wrong, because from their understanding the car should have been good.”