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Title 'a massive long shot' - Button

Jenson Button took his second victory of the season at Spa-Francorchamps © Sutton Images

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• Drivers:
• Jenson Button
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• Martin Whitmarsh

• Teams:
• McLaren

Jenson Button has classed his title chances as "a massive long shot", but said his victory at the Belgian Grand Prix was proof of how quickly the title situation could change.

Button is now 63 points behind championship leader Fernando Alonso, who was taken out in a first corner crash at Spa-Francorchamps, after scoring a dominant lights-to-flag victory. He is confident McLaren can have another strong race in Italy next weekend and reckons he still has a slim chance of winning the drivers' championship.

"It's a massive long shot to win the title but today proves that you can claw back 25 points very very quickly," he said. "A great day for me, but still 63 points (behind). Anything is possible. Monza is a circuit like this in a way, so yeah, there's a good possibility that we will have good pace there. Whether we will be as competitive as we were here we still have to wait and see. The temperatures will be different - it is a little bit different in terms of downforce level so we will see. This is a great weekend for the team - for me anyway, our side of the garage so yeah, it's a good 25 points and if we can keep fighting for victories like this there's so many people in the championship that still have the possibility to win, there's still a small chance that I can really fight for that championship."

Team principal Martin Whitmarsh said Button put in a near perfect performance at Spa, but admitted the team was frustrated after Lewis Hamilton was taken out in the first corner as he felt a one-two victory was possible.

"I'm very frustrated and annoyed that it happened, as of course is Lewis, but it happened and it's done," he said. "You've got to accept that's it, but I personally think we could have had a one-two today and we went away with 25 points but I think we could have gone away with a heck of a lot more. That's frustrating but you can always look at the downturn of races and they're never perfect. Jenson was as close to perfect as you can get so on balance I'm not going to go away feeling too desperately sorry for the team and myself. We'll focus on the remaining eight races with a competitive car, two great drivers and we'll see how the championship finishes up."

McLaren technical director Paddy Lowe is confident the pace that McLaren has shown at the last three races will transfer through to the rest of the season.

"It's really good because Hungary is an unusual circuit [and we won there]. We were good in Germany, but we've seen such a lot of variability that to actually see the strong pace here, which is another different type of circuit, is great because it makes us think we really have got a strong underlying pace that can translate through the next few races."

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