Jenson Button: “We’re not as quick as we might hope”

“You can never really tell on a Friday, but we’re not as quick as we might hope,” said Button. “Friday in Canada was sort of the same. There are a lot of cars here with updates, and if all the updates are working, for sure they’re going to be a lot quicker than what they were in Canada. It’s going to be an exciting weekend, and also a tough weekend for us.

“The car feels pretty good, the only problem is there’s lots of quick cars out there. The Ferrari looks very fast, the Red Bull is as normal, but even the Renaults and the Mercedes are very competitive as well.

“You use the kerbs a lot round here. It’s about hitting them cleanly and bouncing off them well and having a car that rides the kerbs as well. If your car doesn’t ride kerbs, you can lose a lot of time round here.

“We’ve been playing around with the car quite a bit, with the balance. I’m much happier now than I was at the start of P2. It’s getting there. I’m happy with what we have at the moment, we’ve just got to see what we can do overnight and see where we stand in qualifying.

“I don’t think in the race it’s going to be so important here to look after the tyres, so we’ve just got to go all out, 100% all the way.”

Button is looking forward to McLaren’s own update: “People bring different packages at different points in the season. We don’t have an upgrade here and most teams do. So it’s always a little bit tricky. But at Silverstone we do have an upgrade, so we’ve just got to fight it out here and get the best out of what we have.

“It’s a car we know, and it’s just about getting the best out of the car and just tweaking it and make sure we don’t make any mistakes this weekend. We should still get some very good points.”