• British Grand Prix

Button struggling with McLaren updates

Jenson Button is not entirely happy with the balance of his McLaren © Getty Images

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• Race:
• British Grand Prix

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• Drivers:
• Jenson Button

• Teams:
• McLaren

Jenson Button admitted he was struggling to get used to the updated McLaren after practice for the British Grand Prix.

He finished the morning session eighth and then slipped to 13th in the afternoon as his team experimented running its blown diffuser for the first time. He was consistently off the pace of his team-mate Lewis Hamilton and said that he and the team had a lot of work to do overnight to ensure the car is easier to drive in tomorrow's qualifying session.

"Today's been a little bit trickier than expected in the car," he said. "First of all I couldn't get a set-up for the car with the new package, but it improved at the end of the day, but there's still a lot of work we need to do. We are not where we'd like to be. The car is very tricky in a few places around the circuit.

"We've definitely made some improvements in certain places, but we don't have the right balance yet. I haven't had a perfect day today, which is disappointing because even on a Friday it's good to see so many people out there."

McLaren team principal Martin Whitmarsh conceded that the first two practice sessions had not gone entirely to plan, but said teething problems were inevitable when introducing a major upgrade for the first time.

"It was a difficult day for us," he said. "We're exploring the car. I wouldn't say that for a lot of the time the drivers were that comfortable today but we were learning and we will take that data and see what we can do with it this evening.

"The issue is that often when you are developing the car, you are incrementally bringing downforce to the car so the balance of the car and the set-up characteristics don't change dramatically. With the changes that we are evolving on the cars, it requires perhaps a different approach, a different driving style, different set-ups.

"In the era when there is not much testing, that's quite difficult to nail with a limited number of tyres and laps to do it in. That's the modern era of F1 and we've got to take all of the data that we've got today, make some decision of what we've got to do and hopefully get it right.

He said that some of the updates had arrived at the last minute and that the team was still undecided on exactly which bits would run on the car for qualifying and the race.

"Parts were still arriving at 1:30 this morning," Whitmarsh added. "There are a lot of new components on the car and people have worked incredibly long hours, day and night just to get those bits here. It's a big effort. We had a number of different parts on the car today and we've got to make sure that we've got the best package that we can provide to our drivers tomorrow."

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