That wily Jenson Button has it all figured out.
For McLaren to beat Red Bull, they will have to go faster. Brilliant! The guy clearly has completed the Paul Charsley School of Driving online course.*
It may come across a little more complicated than that, but in essence, that’s what Button is saying as the team preps for the German Grand Prix. Here he is in all his glory, via Autosport:
“If we can get this blown diffuser to work we should be competitive and quick enough to really challenge the Red Bulls for victory here – and we have to,” said Button at Hockenheim on Thursday.
“It is the 11th race of the year. Red Bull have obviously won more races than us, and if they are consistent they will be very difficult to beat this season.
“This update has to be a step forward for us around here so we can challenge for the victory. We have to be challenging for victories at every race we go to now. We cannot just be hoping that we do a better job on the race weekend.”
Seems like a solid plan to stop counting on Red Bull to shoot itself in the foot each race weekend, although I certainly wouldn’t rule that out. But if you can be faster than the competition and have the competition mess up each weekend, well… well, then we’d be back in the old Schumacher/Ferrari days, right?
It is sounding like the McLaren folk think they have the blown diffuser figured out, which is a sight better than how it worked in England. Here’s Lewis Hamilton (same source):
“I think we are confident that we have made another step forward in understanding it, and we will try to improve it and try to make it work better than it was then,” he said.
“But we still plan on running lots of sensors and that kind of thing to understand it fully. I’m sure it’s still not optimised, so we’ll keep on working with it, and I’m sure the other teams have to do the same thing. So we don’t expect this weekend for it to be bang on perfect.”
It seems to be shaping up as an interesting weekend with McLaren and Ferrari both gunning for Red Bull, and at least one Red Bull driver — hometown boy Sebastian Vettel — claiming he’ll find a few extra tenths of a second just because he’s at his home grand prix.
Keep your eyes on the weather, though. And watch that tire situation.
* Note to Todd and Paul. New revenue source identified.
