Jenson Button defends himself from being a whiner
While he appears to be experiencing great difficulties at the wheel of his MP4-27 since the return of Formula One to the old continent, Jenson Button, whose radio communications broadcast during the race often show him complaining about the behavior of his car, defends himself against "whining" as some might think.
If he started his season in the most beautiful way, with a victory in Melbourne, Jenson Button nonetheless knows a delicate start to the 2012 exercise. Unable to make it to Q3 twice in the last three events and settling for a meager tenth place on the grid in Montreal, the 2009 world champion even struggled in the race, finishing a distant 16th place on the Gilles Villeneuve circuit, where his teammate Lewis Hamilton won after starting from the front row. The native of Frome also has approximately half as many points as his teammate in the driver standings.
The McLaren driver seems to be mainly struggling with his tires, and recently, he did not hide the difficulties he encountered in understanding the Italian rubber: « It’s certainly more complicated this season. Last year, the tires degraded, but we could understand them, work on them, and set up the car accordingly. But now, I find them difficult to understand. Some people manage to make them work, but we can’t really point fingers at Pirelli and say it’s their fault. »
Jenson Button is well aware that it is up to him to find the key to making the Italian tires work, and since he has been encountering difficulties, it is not uncommon to hear him constantly complaining on the radio about the lack of grip of his MP4-27, but also about vibrations, understeer, or conversely, oversteer.
The selection of radio conversations from the 32-year-old driver, broadcasted during TV transmissions, might suggest that he constantly complains, giving him the image of a whiner, an image reinforced for some by the memory of the 2009 Brazilian Grand Prix, where he complained on the radio about not being able to overtake Kamui Kobayashi, calling for FIA intervention as he was on his way to world championship victory.
Jenson Button is keen to ensure that his radio communications are not misinterpreted: “It’s not whining. People say ‘He’s always whining!’, but it’s not whining. It’s about developing the car during the race. That’s what drivers do,” assures the Briton in the pages of the Mirror. “If you’re driving and you don’t say anything during the entire race, you’re doing something wrong. If you’re complaining about oversteer, understeer, or a problem, it’s to make improvements for the next stint of the race. In the pits, they can increase tire pressure and add front wing, you come back out and it can be better. A driver doesn’t just drive the car, he works on the car with his engineers. If you have a problem, you try to solve it during the race, you don’t wait for the checkered flag to say: ‘During the first stint, I had a lot of understeer.’ If you do that, the engineers will say: ‘Why didn’t you tell us? We could have resolved that for the next stint.'”
In Montreal, it was all the more difficult for the Briton because he couldn’t fully participate in the first two practice sessions and therefore spent his entire weekend trying to make up for lost time to find a car to his liking… in vain.
