Jenson Button says he made a mistake in not sitting out Q3 in Montreal, and instead putting unnecessary miles on the tyres he’ll start the race with.
Having run out of supersofts Button decided to commit to soft tyres for the start. However he could not better 10th place on them, and thus would have been better off had he sat in the garage, allowing him to start on a new set tomorrow.
“We wanted to start the race on the prime tyre, and looking at it now we shouldn’t have bothered running it,” said Button. “It was going to be tricky to beat anyone on the prime tyre, and we had no new options left. We were going to be P10 on an [old] option tyre, so we thought we’d give it a go on a prime and start the race on a prime.
“Maybe we shouldn’t have put five laps on it. But you get in the car and you want to go out and see what you can do with the tyre, and that’s exactly what we did.”
Button is still hopeful that conditions will work in his favour tomorrow.
“I think today wasn’t great. Maybe as I said we shouldn’t have put laps on the prime tyre, because now we have five laps on the tyre starting the race, and the guys behind me have brand new tyres. It’s not the best way to start tomorrow, but it’s going to be a hot race, and I think it’s probably going to be the hottest race we’ve had this year. It will hopefully throw up a few surprises for everyone, and we can still have a good afternoon.”
Adam Cooper F1 