“My Q3 was a right mess,” says Button

Jenson Button was disappointed with his Q3 session in Melbourne but delighted that McLaren has made so much progress with its update package.

Button qualified fourth, but Lewis Hamilton’s second place showed that the car has even more potential.

“I think we should be very happy with it,” said Button. “My Q3 was a right mess. I got stuck behind Rosberg, and Massa had a spin. It was all quite messy out there. My lap in Q2, the one I didn’t actually complete, would actually have been quicker, by quite a bit.

“Disappointing that I didn’t get the best out of it, but I think we should all be very happy with the package that we have here. It’s a massive step forward from what we had in testing, so we should be very pleased with what we’ve done this weekend.

“And there’s so much to build on still. It’s still in a very early stage this car, because we haven’t done much testing, so for it to be reliable, and relatively quick I’m very happy and very proud of the guys back at the factory for putting in all the hard work brining this package here.”

Button admitted that one of the issues in the last session was getting heat into the tyres.

“In Q3 it was, because I had cars all over the place. I think we need to get heat more than others. I was trying to get past to get some heat in the tyres, but they were blocking. It was a bit of a mess out there. It’s tricky in these conditions to get heat in the tyres, but the race will be completely different, we’re fine.

“I’m really looking forward to the race. We can have a good race from fourth – we had a good race from fourth last year – and we’ll see. Sebastian put in a very good lap, but we don’t know what their race pace is going to be like.”