Still no explanation for Button’s retirement at Monza

The McLaren team seemed set to achieve their first one-two of the year at Monza during the Italian Grand Prix, but ultimately, with 19 laps to go, Jenson Button was forced to pull his McLaren off to the side of the track.

The engine of the MP4-27 from the 2009 World Champion shut down due to a fuel pump problem, but despite several days of investigations to try to understand the origin of the failure, Martin Whitmarsh confided on The F1 Show on the British channel Sky Sports F1 that the mystery remains unsolved: « It’s something very unusual for me. What we know is that there were 50 kilos of fuel in the car, but it wasn’t where we wanted it to be – that is, ready to be put into the engine. I can’t recall a moment in recent years where we haven’t managed to solve an issue. »

The director of the McLaren team also specified that the entire system had been changed on Button’s car and that the risk of seeing such a problem occur again was almost nil, but this situation does not fully satisfy him: « It’s a fuel system whose fundamental design hasn’t changed in the last five years, it’s very complex. But clearly, as you can imagine, there won’t be a single element that was in this car [in Monza] that will be in Jenson’s car in Singapore again, so we will probably never see [this problem] again but it’s not as satisfying as saying ‘we know exactly what it is.’ »