Jenson Button sets sights on Ferrari's fourth place after McLaren's strong Sochi
Button & Magnussen's fourth and fifth opens up lead over Force India
Sunday 12 October 2014 16:35, UK
Jenson Button believes it is not completely out of the question that improving McLaren could yet overhaul old rivals Ferrari in the Constructors’ Championship.
The Woking outfit capped a surprisingly competitive weekend on F1’s maiden visit to Russia by finishing in fourth and fifth places with Button and Kevin Magnussen respectively on Sunday, the team’s best two-car result since their double podium back at the season-opener in Melbourne.
With Force India, by contrast, scoring just a solitary point, McLaren head to the next race in Austin with a 20-point cushion over their season-long rival in the battle for fifth place in the teams’ standings.
Button also finished fourth in the wet last week at Suzuka, and while acknowledging that the nature of the new Sochi circuit aided the pace of the MP4-29 this weekend, is confident McLaren have made genuine improvements and can prove it at the next race in three weeks’ time.
“I think we’ve made progress. It’s not all progress – some of it is the circuit – but hopefully we can show we have made progress in Austin,” the 34-year-old told Sky Sports F1.
“We have got a lot of these styles of track, but asphalt-wise we don’t have many like it, the only one is probably Austin. Definitely some of it is down to the way the track is. We’ve lucked in there, but on some other circuits we might luck out. But we have made progress with the car, something we carried over from Suzuka, and we have been playing around with a few different things on the front-wing which has helped us.”
Indeed, with the former champions appearing to be making more progress than most into the closing races of the season, Button suggested fifth in the standings might not be the height of McLaren’s ambitions in 2014.
“Only 45 points behind Ferrari. I know it’s a big ask, but last race is double points...we could possibly challenge them,” he added with a smile after McLaren took 22 points out of the Italian marque over the Japan-Russia flyaway leg.
The timesheet showed that Button finished the Russian race in splendid isolation in fourth place – 12 seconds behind third-placed Valtteri Bottas and 23 seconds ahead of team-mate Magnussen. But while short on wheel-to-wheel action, the former World Champion said he still learnt a lot during the course of the 53 laps.
“The first five or six laps were fun then after that it was a bit boring really. But nice boring in a way because we could do our own thing and really feel the car,” he explained.
“You are always working out the best places to save ERS and not go full throttle and where to save fuel and trying to get the maximum out of it. So it was quite interesting in that respect. We did the most we could – ten seconds to P3 and 30 seconds back to the first Ferrari and even more than that to the first Red Bull. That’s a big deal for us right now.”
Whether Button’s pair of fourth places over the last eight days prove enough to convince McLaren’s bosses that the 34-year-old is deserving of a contract renewal remains uncertain, with the spectre of Fernando Alonso’s return to Woking for 2015 still looming.
Asked if it would be nice to reunite with McLaren’s incoming engine partner Honda, Button replied: “Yes, it would. But at the moment we’re taking it race by race. I’m enjoying it, enjoying racing. I think as a team we did a good job this weekend and I definitely got the maximum out of what I was given. It’s all you can do.”