Germany: Jenson Button Qualifying Q&A


By Phil Huff
July 12 2009

Jenson Button took third on the grid for the German Grand Prix, and sat with the media afterwards to answer a few questions. With Mark Webber stealing the limelight (justifiably) there wasn't much for the Brawn GP driver, but here's what he had to say...

Jenson, you had to abort a few laps that session. Tell us how hard it was for you?

Yeah, it is great for everyone who is in the top ten. That Q2 session was madness. It was good fun and we are struggling with tyre warm up anyway but when you chuck a little bit of water in there as well it is quite difficult. It is great to see Rubens and myself up here in the top three. Mark got his first pole position, so congratulations to him. Tomorrow is going to be an interesting one. The weather is looking similar to today, so it is going to be wet dry, wet dry. It is a little bit of luck but also looking at what other people are doing and trying to make the best out of the situation, so I am looking forward to it very much.

It is your best qualifying here. What are your thoughts and how was it managed for you from the pit lane?

Reasonably well. I had Rubens's information and he went to slick tyres in Q2 when we went to wets and I just thought it was too wet out there at that point in time. But Rubens made them work and he got the right window and you saw everybody else piling in to the pits sticking on slick tyres and then it started raining again, so it was pretty tricky. It was a session I did not want, Q2. I think it is great getting through to Q3 and I think being in the top three, whoever is in the top three, should be happy with what they have done. We are in a good position for tomorrow. It is going to be a tough race. So much can happen with the weather here. Twelve degrees in mid July, this is worse than England. Who says English weather is bad. It is not making it easy but I think we have done a good job this weekend. We found it tough on Friday but we improved the car. But it is still going to be a tough race for us.

Is there less of a problem with tyre temperatures here than there was at Silverstone?

Yeah, there's less of an issu. We've got the super soft tyre here and you don't have all that high speed (track), which for us doesn't put that much heat in the tyre. You've got braking here which is good for us, we're good under braking and it's putting heat into the tyres. It's not too bad, it's such a difficult weekend because it's all to do with if you can get the tyres to work or not. On my timed laps I'm weaving on the straight to try to get heat into the tyres. It's a strange situation to be in but it's where we are and we've got to make the best of it and I think we have done that today, so I'm happy with the result.

The hard tyres can be the key to the race tomorrow. How is your car with the hard tyres?

With the hard tyres? It's not just us, I think everyone's struggling to get heat into the hard tyres. The biggest problem for us is… it's fine when you're in clear air, you can work the tyres hard and get a lap time out of them. The problem is when you're in traffic, it's very difficult, you lose a lot of downforce and I just can't keep the heat in the tyres. I've never driven in this situation before, where you just can't get heat into the tyres in traffic. Even weaving on the straight doesn't help. It's a difficult situation. Hopefully we'll have a clear track tomorrow during the race. That's going to be difficult to achieve, I think, but we'll give it a good go. The thing is that the consistency on the tyre is good if you get it into the working range. The problem with the softer tyre is that you can damage that tyre. It's a difficult position for all of us to be in and it's who can make the best of it tomorrow. I think it's looking good.

You just described the downsides of the two tyre choices, so which one is the better one for the race or which has less downsides?

That's something we need to talk about this evening. It's going to be a tough call but a very crucial call for tomorrow and we've got to keep checking the weather, the temperatures tomorrow and there's a big chance of rain as well. There are so many possibilities for tomorrow that it's going to be a very difficult call but so far we've been pretty good at calling the right tyres. The good thing today for us was that even in the wet conditions we could get the slick tyre working. That's a little bit unexpected. So our pace was good with the slick tyre in the damp conditions and our pace was good on whatever tyre we put on, so that's positive for tomorrow for sure. These guys had a big advantage in Shanghai in the wet but I don't think that's going to be quite the case here if it's wet.

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