Jenson Button says it is unlikely you will see the true benefit of Honda’s engine upgrade at the Belgian Grand Prix but reckons races like Singapore could see McLaren more in the hunt with its main rivals.
Advertisement
The McLaren team is still short on pace to rival the likes of Mercedes, Red Bull and Ferrari but has improved in 2016 and now sits seventh in the constructors championship. Leaving F1 is also an option for the Briton, who has not ruled out a move to the World Endurance Championship where he would be competing alongside the likes of ex-F1 drivers Mark Webber, Sebastien Buemi and Anthony Davidson. This year’s progress has been muffled by last year’s struggles, Alonso said as the team prepare to return from the summer shutdown.
“If you look at the team 12 months ago we were in a very different situation”.
The McLaren-Honda F1 team have improved gradually race by race this season, but although they have made a big step forward from where they were this time past year, they are still some way off the levels of performance a team of their stature would expect to achieve. We had to make sure the reliability was in place, power, driveability, aerodynamics.
But asked whether he thought McLaren should still be working on improving its 2016 vehicle, he simply said: “Well, I think we want to be world champions”.
“The regs and everything will change a little bit and if the cars are fun to drive and exciting to drive, I will probably stay longer and drive more years in Formula One, but if the cars are still giving me the feeling I had in the last couple of years I will stop”.
“The change opens a hope for all of us, not only at McLaren, everything is new for everyone”.
He also revealed that while there are still races to be run this season, he and the rest of the McLaren team are nearly exclusively focused on the development of that 2017 vehicle.
Advertisement
Rather than being about raw pace, more and more the sport has become about conserving tyres and batteries, which makes it less likely to see drivers pushing their cars to the absolute limit. “We are concentrated on being world champions, which requires a big improvement for next year”. That leaves the Woking based squad with three tokens left to use across the remainder of the season.
