McLaren within range of Red Bull Racing Team – Jenson Button
McLaren’s Jenson Button has recently stated after the team’s performance at the Friday Free Practice (FP) sessions of the Chinese Grand Prix that the team is within striking distance of Red Bull Racing Team now and a few tweaks will do the job for the two
drivers according to Jenson.
The 2009 Formula 1 world champion was able to score the 3rd fastest time of FP2 and was just over 2 tenths of a second slower than Sebastian Vettel’s fastest time of the session.
However, he believes that McLaren still has some time to set-up its car and probably gain some lost ground.
“This morning was reasonably good and the car was working well - it's a good car to drive. For the afternoon, we tried a few things and didn't really improve the balance of the car, so we're going to look at why the changes didn't really give us the improvement
we expected”, said Jenson.
Button revealed that the car felt much stronger over the longer runs on the harder tyres but since he was not able to perfect the car’s balance on the soft tyres, he plans to score some laps on soft tyres during Saturday’s free practice session before the
qualifying.
“The car felt reasonably strong on the prime tyre but less so on the option. So it's not been a perfect afternoon but we have a lot of information on the changes we made, so we can hopefully work on improving the set-up tomorrow”, Button stated.
He added that the weather conditions are not as hot as they were back in Malaysian as a result of which, Jenson thinks that the tyres will not be a very big issue for the drivers. Button believes that if the team figures out a way to balance its car until
the qualifying session, McLaren is going to be much closer to Red Bull Racing Team relatively.
McLaren revealed a couple of days ago that they would apply some major upgrades to their new car for the Chinese Grand Prix and it seems that those upgrades are helping the team a lot at the moment in increasing its pace.
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