McLaren F1 and Button are “nowhere” at Interlagos
For Jenson Button, the first day of the Brazilian Grand Prix was not good, as he was hampered by numerous issues, with his main concern being the top speed.
At the end of the first day of testing for the Brazilian Grand Prix, Jenson Button did not hide his skepticism regarding the performance of his car, especially in terms of top speed.
« There are things we are trying on the car that have been different for a few races, and it’s not working, » he admitted to Sky Sports. « It’s good to know; I feel it’s bad in many aspects, so at least we know where to go with the settings, which is positive. »
« The only thing we find strange is that our straight-line speed is far off the mark. Yet, we are not running with that much downforce. If we wanted to reach such a straight-line speed, we would have to remove the wings, » he joked.
During the second free practice, Jenson Button reached a top speed of 324.4 km/h, which was the 12th highest speed of the session, more than 7 km/h behind the Mercedes and Williams cars.
« I don’t know why we are not very fast, and it’s something we need to resolve because it’s a lot of time lost on the straights. So, a lot of work to do for tomorrow, but I think we understand what the problems are and we can fix them for tomorrow. »
The Briton believes that McLaren will absolutely need dry running this Saturday when rain is expected to be very present: « Tomorrow, it will be colder, it will probably rain, and that’s going to change everything. But it’s important to set up the car well for the dry because Sunday is going to be dry even if qualifying is wet. We need FP3 in the dry because at the moment we are nowhere.
« If we are where we are now, it won’t be good, but the car is really better than that. So we just need to maximize what we have and we haven’t done that because we tried a few different things on the car with the future in mind and also tried to fix some other problems we have. They didn’t work so we will go back, » he concluded.
