Jenson Button admits he has to do better in qualifying is he is to maintain a challenge for the title this year.
Jenson has been scoring points regularly, but has not started ahead of McLaren team mate Lewis Hamilton since the fourth race in China.
“Compared to my team mate I need to qualify better,” said Button. “In Valencia I made a mistake, completely my fault. In the last race, I struggled with the set-up, because the car was oversteery. I took a lot of front wing out of the car and I just lost downforce for qualifying, that was the basic issue.
“I’m not putting too much pressure on myself. I’m pretty confident that if I start far back I can have a good race, but I want to start at the front and make my life a bit easier. It’s nothing to get too worked up about, it’s about fine tuning the set-up on Friday and Saturday and making sure the car is to my liking when we go into qualifying.
“Compared to the Red Bulls you would say that we do need a bit more performance in qualifying. That is a team effort, but I also have to work on myself, with the engineers, in making sure I get a set-up that I’m happy with going into qualifying. There are two parts to it, really. But this blown diffuser, if it works this weekend, will be competitive, and we can really challenge the Red Bulls.”
Button acknowledges that McLaren cannot rely on bad luck for RBR proving a helping hand: “We have to be challenging for victories every race we go to now. We can’t just be hoping that we do a better job on the race weekend.”
Adam Cooper F1 