Friday: Button struggling with his tires at McLaren
If Lewis Hamilton showed his ease during the two practice sessions and remains optimistic about his chances of victory - although he will drop five places on the starting grid, Jenson Button, struggling with his tire management, had a challenging day.
Lewis Hamilton – 1st and 2nd:
« It was a great day! The track stayed dry in the afternoon, so we were able to successfully complete our program. We continue to work on improving the settings, but the new updates to the car seem to be working: the guys at the factory did a great job.
We seem competitive and I particularly focused on long stints for this weekend. We still need to make some improvements, but our car looks good.
I’m going to change the gearbox before Free Practice 3. The qualifying session will be tight: it will be a good fight, and hopefully, we can start as high as possible on the grid because I think we remain in the race among the leading group.
Jenson Button – 8th and 6th:
« It was a bit of a difficult day for me. I tried to find the right settings, but the cool temperatures made it hard to understand the car because the tires weren’t working perfectly.
Tomorrow, it should be a little warmer than today: we don’t really understand the tire temperatures and can’t get them to work properly. Furthermore, if we make setup changes and the tire temperature changes by 5 to 10°C, these modifications become useless. It’s something we need to resolve, but we have a lot of interesting information on stints with varying fuel levels.
It was a challenging day but there is a lot of good information to work with: we will find solutions by tomorrow.
