Jenson Button felt his twelfth place during qualifying for the German Grand Prix was ‘reasonable’ after a tricky weekend with reduced mileage, mainly due to his eye issue from Friday.
The McLaren-Honda driver was happy to out-qualify team-mate Fernando Alonso at the Hockenheimring, but felt it would have been tricky to get much higher even with all the issues he’s faced this weekend.
Despite this, Button still feels there is a chance of making it into the points on Sunday, and believes finding the right strategy is key to be able to do that.
“This weekend has been pretty tricky for me,” said Button. “I’ve missed having time with the car, which doesn’t make for the easiest preparation, and this is a tough circuit if you haven’t had any mileage.
“I had a few issues yesterday – I stepped out of the car early because of my eye – then, this morning, we had a couple of problems, so I didn’t run the Supersoft in FP3 at all. It was all a bit of an unknown going into qualifying.
“Still, 12th position is reasonable, and it’s always nice to be in front of your team-mate, but we’re still not quite there yet with the balance of the car. Even if we’d got everything together and beaten Williams today, getting into the top 10 was always going to be tricky.
“There’s a possibility that we’ll get into the points tomorrow. The race should be pretty interesting; the start and the strategy will be important, so I’m looking forward to seeing what we can do.”
