Jenson Button has had a great run of races recently, but in Korea he struggled badly with lack of front end grip, a problem that also hurt Lewis Hamilton.
Crucially he was lacking performance onto the pit straight, and thus into the DRS activation zone that followed it.
That made it hard for him to compete with those ahead, and after recivering from a bad first lap he ultimately had to settle for fourth.
“Towards the ends of the stints the pace was OK, but I just couldn’t get close enough in the last sector,” said Button. “Whether I didn’t have enough front end in the car or not, but I put a lot of front end in the car at the stops, but still i had so much understeer in the last sector I couldn’t get close enough to them to use DRS. I only used it once during the whole race.
“When you’re out of the DRS zone it’s really tricky, because the car in front if he’s using DRS is gaining half a second on you, and to make that up over lap to try and get DRS the next lap is quite tricky.”
Button’s race was made harder when he lost out to Felipe Massa and Mark Webber on the first lap: “The start was alright. I thought Mark was behind me down into Turn 3, I don’t know where Massa was, and I braked where I felt was correct, and it felt correct. I turned in and there was a car there, I couldn’t see him at all before I actually turned in.
“And then I was stuck on the outside and lost a lot of places. I don’t think it would have changed my race, even if I didn’t have a bad start, a bad first lap, because I wasn’t quick enough.”
He also had an interesting battle out of the pitlane with Nico Rosberg which saw the German emerge first, slide wide, and then re-pass Jenson via DRS on the next straight.
“It’s a weird one here because coming out of the pits, second is actually better, because you get the DRS all the way down to Turn 3. But he locked up coming out of the pitlane so I ended up going across the DRS line first. I don’t think he did it on purpose, you don’t plan a lock-up. So I crossed the DRS line first, he got the DRS, and got past me on the straight. So just a little bit unlucky on that.
“It’s not a great one, but it’s better than last year, I struggled here a lot last year. It’s not one of my better circuits. I didn’t have any more really, so fourth was it. Couldn’t get close enough to use DRS, so fourth was it. A bit disappointed, but we’ll go back and look at the data and look at the reasons for it.”
Adam Cooper F1 