As Red Bull lives up to its promise and gives you wings - certainly if you're German and have better long term prospects than your Australian teammate - McLaren vows that it will never favour one driver over the other.

As the controversy over the decision to remove the new front wing from Mark Webber's car and give it to his teammate continues, Martin Whitmarsh - though not wanting to pour fuel on the fire (as if) - has vowed to give his drivers total parity.

"We try very hard to give the drivers the same equipment at the same time. That's important," he told reporters in the Silverstone paddock last night as the Red Bull controversy unfolded.

"We know both drivers will do everything they can to race hard as ever," he continued, "and if we expect that from them, then they should expect from us to be as fair and open as we can. That's what we try to set out to do.

"This weekend we were pushing very hard to bring forward this new floor, and we decided that if there was only one we would not use it for this race. I think the cohesiveness of the team is such that you don't need to set up those sort of tensions."

Asked about the situation along the pitlane at Red Bull, Whitmarsh played a cautious game. "I'm not commenting on what happened there and what their equipment is," he replied, "but all we try and do is be as fair and as open as we can with the drivers.

"There are many incidents, either real or imaginary, because both have happened, where one driver has been favoured or senses that his team mate is being favoured," he continued. "In those circumstances it is to the detriment to the overall performance of the team, and certainly the individual who feels he is being stitched up."

The Englishman admitted that he is still nagged by doubts about an incident last year when Hamilton had a new floor installed in his car while teammate Kovalainen was forced to continue with an older version.

"We were fighting to bring performance to our car, and we had one set of kit and we put it on Lewis' car," he said. "We announced it before the event, were very open about it, but I felt deeply uncomfortable, even in the circumstances where Lewis was a long way ahead of Heikki. "Heikki understood and was completely relaxed about it but I, to this day, didn't feel good in doing that."