McLaren have admitted that Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button must finish ahead of current championship leader Mark Webber at Sunday's Korean Grand Prix if they are to keep their hopes of winning this year's drivers' title alive.

The 2008 champion Hamilton is currently 28 points behind the Australian with three races to go while last year's winner Button is 31 points adrift.

"I think our target is very much to get on the podium and we need to be in front of Webber," principal race engineer Phil Prew told the Vodafone McLaren Mercedes phone-in.

"We need to have two cars at the front competing for the front row of the grid in qualifying and then delivering a race result on the podium.

"To be honest Korea is a very good combination of quite a few different sorts of circuit. It has some long straights with big stops, which is not dissimilar to Canada and should suit our car.

"Sector two is a bit like Turkey, where we performed quite well and the final sector would typically be on a very high downforce circuit, a bit more like Hungary perhaps.

"If I had to say which car it would favour, I would actually say it was quite a neutral circuit and there are aspects of the track that will favour every one of the top teams.

"It just depends whether we can gain enough in the high-speed section to compensate, perhaps, for the strengths of the Red Bull in the long corners that we see towards the end of the lap.

"I think there are certainly areas where we will excel in and certain areas where Red Bull will be very strong. I don't think any of the cars will have it all their own way."

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