Button: sorry if we’re making it boring 05 Jun 2009
Jenson Button smiled at suggestions on Thursday - from no less a luminary than 2005 and ‘06 world champion Fernando Alonso - that his winning streak is making the sport boring for the spectators.
“I can't do anything about that,” Button laughed as he thought about his 16-point lead over Brawn team mate Rubens Barrichello. “All we do is do the best job we can. And at the moment we are doing a better job than other teams. I’m sorry if it gets boring, but you need to look at the other teams.”
As Lewis Hamilton said that he confidently expects Red Bull, Ferrari and Brawn to be able to take Istanbul Park’s daunting Turn Eight flat out (but not his own recalcitrant McLaren MP4-24), Button added: “If you look at the races and the lap times, we haven’t walked away with any races. There has always been a team as quick as us through the stints. It’s just that we have tended to do a better job over the whole race weekend.”
Button shares Hamilton’s concern about the threat of the Adrian Newey-designed Red Bull RB5, driven by Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber, which has shown great speed and stability through fast, sweeping corners and will be running its two-tier diffuser for the first time on a really open track after introducing it for Monaco a fortnight ago. “The good thing is there is only one really high-speed corner on this circuit,” he said with a tight grin.
Meanwhile, BMW Sauber have confirmed that they won’t be running KERS again this weekend. Robert Kubica said that he is really looking forward to trying the team’s new two-tier diffuser here instead. “Well, I think to be better than Monaco will be easy,” he began. “Now we have to see how much gain the double diffuser will bring and how our performance will be better than in the last races. In Barcelona it was not so bad. Unfortunately in two very important moments of the weekend we had two problems. But Monaco was quite difficult. I am expecting, of course, better performance but I don’t know how much.
“No, we are not using KERS here. As we have the double diffuser we have to concentrate on it. It can have quite a big influence on the car balance and on the set-up, so we have to work as much as possible on this and try to extract the maximum from it. We will have to see.”
David Tremayne
