Jenson Button was able to secure only his third points finish of the season at the Sochi Autodrom, but admitted the early stages of the race was tricky as he was a ‘sitting duck’ down the long straights.
The McLaren-Honda driver was running inside the top ten in the early stages of the race after being able to capitalise on a number of other drivers being compromised at the first corner, but was passed with relative ease by drivers such as Felipe Nasr and Felipe Massa.
Despite this he was still in contention for points, and when Daniel Ricciardo and Carlos Sainz Jr retired through mechanical issues and Valtteri Bottas was spun off the road by Kimi Raikkonen, Button was able to secure ninth place and two points.
“Today, we did everything right, did the best we could, and we took home some points,” said Button. “I was a sitting duck for the first couple of laps: I couldn’t really fight off the people behind, my deployment was cutting off at the end of the straights, so it was very easy for people to overtake.
“That was tricky: they were trying to pass me into Turn 13, which is a pretty scary place, especially when you don’t have DRS and can’t gauge the closing speed of the cars behind.
“Still, it wasn’t bad. I was racing Fernando [Alonso] for the whole race, which was all I could really do, as all the other cars were quicker.”
Despite finishing inside the points, Button does not feel the team have made that much progress with their MP4/30 this weekend, with the Briton revealing McLaren did ‘interesting things’ with their set-up to try and get a better result.
“We haven’t made massive progress with the car’s performance, but we did lots of interesting things with the set-up this weekend,” said Button. “We’ll analyse those and see whether they paid off or not.”
