Jenson Button believes McLaren closer to Red Bull pace in 2011 than they were last year – Formula 1
The 2009 Formula 1 champion has recently stated that McLaren are much closer to Red Bull Racing team than they were as compared to the 2010 Formula 1 season in terms of pace.
Lewis Hamilton was over 7 tenths of a second slower than Sebastian Vettel’s Red Bull in terms of lap times during the qualifying sessions. Vettel finished the Australian Grand Prix more than 22 seconds before Lewis which indicates that McLaren need to work
a lot on their new car in order to get closer to the RB7 in terms of pace.
However, Button believes that these statistics do not matter much as he is confident that McLaren are much quicker than they look especially in race conditions.
“Clearly, the Red Bulls are quick, Sebastian's pole lap showed everyone that. But, on race pace, it would look as if we're already a lot closer at this stage of the season than we were last year,” said Jenson.
He added that not using the Kinetic Energy Recovery System device gave Red Bull Racing team a couple of tenths over McLaren in terms of pace. Since Lewis’ car received some damage, the 2008 champion had to nurse his way to the finish line and as a result,
he was unable to show the true pace of the MP4-26.
Nevertheless, Jenson believes that McLaren cannot be ruled out of the championship at all as this is just the beginning of the 2011 Formula 1 season and there is still a lot more to come.
“We're very definitely in the hunt. I think there's a massive amount of untapped potential in our car: Sunday was the first time we'd even completed a race distance with the car, which tells you how much there is to get out of the package,” said the 2009
Formula 1 champion.
Jenson on the other hand finished the race in 6th place which was quite disappointing as compared to Hamilton’s performance which proved that the MP4-26 has the potential to run for the podium positions.
Other than that, he stated that Ferrari are going to be very strong as well and they started the weekend strongly as well with Fernando Alonso finishing in 4th place.
“All in all, it's looking like a continuation of the battle between the three top teams that we saw last year, which will be great for the sport and the fans,” he added.
Nevertheless, the teams are confident about the Malaysian Grand Prix and both McLaren and Ferrari are hoping to close the gap between them and Red bull Racing soon.
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