• Malaysian Grand Prix - FP2

Button perplexed by McLaren's wet pace

ESPN Staff
March 22, 2013 « F1 'all about the tyres' - Webber | I could have gone faster - Raikkonen »
Jenson Button was only 12th fastest overall in FP2 © Sutton Images
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Jenson Button admits he doesn't know why McLaren is so much more competitive in wet conditions after rain-affected second practice for the Malaysian Grand Prix.

McLaren's struggles appeared to be continuing on Friday with Button unable to match Lewis Hamilton's best FP1 time from 12 months ago set in the MP4-27. However, in the afternoon session a spell of rain required the intermediate tyres to be used and Button was quickest on that compound, but said after the session that McLaren is "miffed" by the car's wet pace.

"I don't understand why that is," Button said. "I think we're all miffed a little bit because I don't know how you can be so far off the pace in the dry; maybe we're running less fuel on the inter than other people but I think we showed in Melbourne also that we could get the inter working.

"So we're looking in to the reasons why and hopefully that'll help us with development but at the moment we've just got to focus on what we do with the dry tyre. It is smoother here so it does help us a little bit; we're not going to be fighting at the front still but I think we can get closer to getting the best out of what we have."

Button added that he didn't think a strategic approach to the weekend was likely to help McLaren as much as it could have in Melbourne.

"We're not looking at strategically starting 10th; I don't think we'll have a choice of starting in the top ten! I don't think there's a lot of degradation here, I think we're not going to see much degradation in the race at all so it's definitely not an issue that we have here like we had in the first race."

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