Briton says trial set-ups aimed at 2015 will be reversed for weekend
Tuesday 25 November 2014 17:51, UK
Jenson Button admits McLaren were "nowhere" on the opening day of the Brazilian GP but is confident they know the changes to make in order to move back up the order.
After a Thursday at Interlagos in which Button was the focus of the media’s attention with the 34-year-old’s F1 future increasingly up in the air, it was back to on-track matters for the Briton on Friday on the circuit where he won the 2009 World Championship and, more recently, achieved his last F1 victory two years ago.
Button’s day didn’t get off to the best of starts, however, when an ERS glitch struck on his installation lap – with the resultant change of unit sidelining him for the rest of the first session. And while he did return to the track in the afternoon to complete a more healthy 31 laps, he wound up a lowly 16th on the timesheet – two seconds off the Mercedes’ pace. Team-mate Kevin Magnussen was only tenth in the sister car.
Button largely attributed the team's difficulties to set-up changes made to the MP4-29 as they continue to use practice sessions to look at ideas for 2015, however he did also express concern over their straightline speed compared to the opposition.
“We’ve got some things that we’re trying out on the car that’s been different for quite a few races, and it’s not working,” he told Sky Sports News HQ.
“It’s good to know; I feel that it’s wrong in many different ways so at least we know the way to go with the set-up, which is positive. The only thing we find quite strange is our straightline speed is so far off. We’re not running that different in downforce. We’d struggle to go that speed in a straightline, we’d have to take the wings off.
“I don’t know why we’re not very quick in a straightline around here and it’s something we need to solve because it’s a lot of time we’re losing on the straights. So a lot of work to do overnight but I think we understand what the issues are and we can solve them for tomorrow.”
Button did acknowledge that dialling in a better dry-weather set-up on track on Saturday may be scuppered by the forecast rain, with heavy showers - and a lunchtime thunderstorm - predicted for the duration.
“Tomorrow’s going to be much cooler, probably raining, and it’ll mix it up again. But it’s important to get it right on the dry set-up because Sunday’s going to be dry even if qualy’s wet,” he explained.
“We need a dry P3 really because at the moment we’re nowhere.”
Despite the Friday problems, Button is far from worried: "If we were we are now it won’t be very good, but the car’s definitely better than this.
"So we’ve just got to maximise what we have and we haven’t done that because we’ve tried a couple of different things on the car for ideas for the future and also to try and get rid of a few other issues that we had. They haven’t worked, so we’ll go back."
