The Button Question?

[Kyle?]

I think it's a little too early to be comparing Button to Massa.

Over the last 3 races, Massa has done far better than Button, i think it's right to compare them.

 

[WestCoastBoogaloo]

Over the last 3 races, Massa has done far better than Button, i think it's right to compare them.

Considering that the 'Massa Question' thread was based over his 2010 and 2011 performances, I stand by my previous comment that comparisons based over 3 races between the two drivers (or indeed any drivers) are premature. If it comes to the end of the season and Button's performances continue to be poor then I believe the comparison would be justified but until then, I'm going to refrain from jumping to conclusions.

 

[BrightLampShade]

I agree that Button is now in the 'Massa league' of badness, but he's still a few races off matching Massa's stretch at being ... bad.

 

[cosicave]

I have offered an explanation (my opinion) of Button's recent drop in form elsewhere.

I also think it is completely wrong to compare him with Massa, whose dour performances have been going on for an awful long time, with only the briefest moments of sparkle –and even on those few occasions, he has still been largely unable to match his team mate.

Unlike Massa, in my opinion, Button is very much worthy of his place within his team. I believe he will be far more competitive at the more technical circuits, where 'flow' counts for more than very heavy braking from high speed on tyres that suffer badly when abused.

 

[Kyle?]

I have offered an explanation (my opinion) of Button's recent drop in form elsewhere.

I also think it is completely wrong to compare him with Massa, whose dour performances have been going on for an awful long time, with only the briefest moments of sparkle –and even on those few occasions, he has still been largely unable to match his team mate.

Unlike Massa, in my opinion, Button is very much worthy of his place within his team. I believe he will be far more competitive at the more technical circuits, where 'flow' counts for more than very heavy braking from high speed on tyres that suffer badly when abused.

How is Massa supposed to match his teammate, when his teammate is the best driver of this generation?

 

[Delete Me]

Remember Jenson is needed up there to help Lewis increase the gap as both Seb and Alonso will be slugging it out with him the whole way. As long as he has Jenson under control at a distance he's his best friend... until he starts getting in the way of course which would play into his rivals hands.

 

[North North Watford]

Before the last Grand Prix, the Button-Hamilton head-to-head during their time as teammates was:

Button 529 points, 6 wins, 21 podiums
Hamilton 530 points, 6 wins, 18 podiums

Hamilton has had a couple of bad patches over the last two and a bit years too, but the objective among us never doubted that he was still a potential race-winner. Jenson has kept pace with Lewis over a sustained period of time, and for that reason deserves a similar amount of benefit of the doubt.

 

[Delete Me]

I've doubted Button in the past many times in the past, but I'm very very! sure he will be back soon. He might even do an Alonso 2010 on us and actually turn out to be the main threat for all we know when it comes to the end. Considering how 2012 is going it's possible to catch up if your higher up more than others.

 

[cosicave]

Before the last Grand Prix, the Button-Hamilton head-to-head during their time as teammates was:

Button 529 points, 6 wins, 21 podiums
Hamilton 530 points, 6 wins, 18 podiums

Hamilton has had a couple of bad patches over the last two and a bit years too, but the objective among us never doubted that he was still a potential race-winner. Jenson has kept pace with Lewis over a sustained period of time, and for that reason deserves a similar amount of benefit of the doubt.

Thanks, NNW; I was not aware of those statistics (although I should add that statistics do not hold great interest for me).

How is Massa supposed to match his teammate, when his teammate is the best driver of this generation?

That is not what I was responding to.
My reply was to the suggestion that Button's and Massa's relative values to their respective teams is comparable –which, as I have made clear above, I disagree with. Besides, your assertion about Alonso is continually thrown into doubt by Alonso himself, who fears Hamilton more than anyone else on the grid. He sometimes appears virtually obsessed by the only driver who's beaten him over an F1 season.

I do not intend to repeat myself in this thread. If you want to discuss the relative merits of Hamilton and Alonso, it deserves another thread but is not really relevant to the question asked about Button here.

 

[Aloonatron]

Well, I see that this debate has done what most do, and people start to try to make silly comments to wind people up and tried to make this a Massa Vs button thread.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch.... The team have come out with a statement saying that they tried a new suspension set-up to help Jenson but they had little time to test this in practice due to his gear box failure, which seems to have been a bad idea.

This does sound like the sort of comment that a team comes out with when they want to back a driver up and deflect criticism onto the team though, and while this is true and it probably explains the extreme drop off in performance in Canada, it doesn't explain why they have the need to try new things out in the first place, which is because he has been struggling to get the car to work in the last few races.

One other factor that isn't helping him is the closeness of the field this season. In the past, if a driver in a top team had been stuggling a little, they would still have been finishing in the top 6 or 8 quite easily. Now though, they find themselves finishing outside the points entirely, which can't be good for their confidence.

 

[Smithers]

Here is the thread where Mclaren (Icluding Ron - Very unexpected!) have firmly laid the blame at their door and not Buttons's! Ron also implies that Buttons car was not identical or their was a problem with Jenson's car compared with the one Lewis was driving!

Not sure how true the statements are but it all points to a fundemtal problem with the car/setup/suspension that must have beed developed differently from the first few races! In Oz he was awesome and he had excellent pace in Sepang prior to him rfearing the HRT!

http://www1.skysports.com/formula-1/news/12479/7807723/McLaren-rally-round-Button

 

[Big Ern]

it works as an excuse for Canada, but what about the last few races? they can't use that excuse. I think part of the problem is one of confidence that Button has had for years, he's scared of binning an uncomfortable car and stops him pushing his car past that point becaus ehe lacks a bit of faith in it. Take last years Canadian GP, when it was actually wet and there was little grip Button was far slower than Lewis, because driving in the wet with zero grip is a matter of faith as well as skill, you can keep grip tip-toeing around the corner or you can put it in knowing the grip is gonna disappear but have faith it'll line up on the way out, sometimes it goes wrong and you end up off the track, but I think it shows the mentality of a driver, those who are willing to drive on their faith and those that aren't.

 

[TheModestMatt]

I wouldnt say its panic stations for Button, he will bounce back very soon, McLaren just need to keep bringing upgrades to the car like the rest of the front runners.

 

[Smithers]

I have to agree Miggins that confidence seems to be compounding whatever fundemental issue sits within the car's development. He reminds me of Colt Trickle !

When is he going to get "through it Harry"?

 

[Forza Bianchi]

Here's what Mark Hughes has to say:

Montreal 2011 was probably Jenson Button's greatest drive. Montreal 2012 was possibly his worst. The only driver with such severe tyre degradation that he was forced to three-stop, Button came home a disastrous 16th, lapped by his winning team-mate Lewis Hamilton. He came into the weekend determined to put a line under his recent woes, but they only worsened.

In Monaco, after failing to reach Q3 for the second successive time, he said: "I'm clearly doing something wrong, either in my driving or set-up choices, and I need to find out what it is quickly, because I'm losing points here."

He decided he was going to take a new-broom approach to the Montreal weekend and had the team remove a key piece of what is described as 'electronic trickery' that had been on both cars all season. The team is very secretive about what it might be, but Jenson felt that the system may have been confusing his senses in the feedback he was getting from the car, and that this may have been causing him to make poor set-up choices.

For Montreal he would get back to basics and he also decided to forgo the new Montreal-specific rear suspension that would be fitted to Hamilton's car, which had less anti-squat built into its geometry. This would allow the Hamilton car to squat (under acceleration) and dive (under braking) a little more, mainly for the benefit of traction. But it would also mean the car wouldn't be kept in as tightly-defined a ride height window, with potential resultant aerodynamic losses.

Deciding not to go into the weekend with two new variables, Jenson began Friday practice with the conventional suspension and the 'electronic trickery' removed. However, his running was curtailed part-way through P1 - before he'd been able to get any long-run tyre data - by a gearbox bearing problem that damaged a seal and allowed oil to leak onto the clutch. At first it was believed to be just a failed seal and the seal was replaced ready for the next session. But only after it was started up and the oil leak was still there was it revealed the damaged bearing was causing the seals to fail - so the gearbox had to be removed yet again.

At this point, still trying to get Button out for some of P2, McLaren began fitting a spare gearbox, but this was of a different specification, like Hamilton's, with a casing designed for the pick-up points of the new rear suspension. Had this been fitted in time Button would thereby have been forced to run with the Hamilton-spec suspension. Instead they ran out of time, Button got no meaningful P2 running and overnight the team fixed Button's original gearbox and had it back on the car for Saturday and Sunday.

Had Button not had the problem, he'd have likely discovered during the Friday long runs that his chosen set-up was excessively hard on the left-rear tyre. Instead, this was only discovered in the race. Jenson had a car that struggled to switch its front tyres on, giving him understeer into the corners, but which then gripped mid-corner, inducing the rear into oversteer on corner exits. This destroyed the rears.

So it can be appreciated that whilst a gearbox problem is never good, the timing of this one was disastrous, for it prevented Button from discovering how his new set-up behaved over a race stint - and that it wasn't simply a case of using his team-mate's data to catch up on lost time, because he was using a fundamentally different set-up to Hamilton.

But all this only explains how his problems were exacerbated by the gearbox, not why he was having such problems in the first place that he elected to try something so different.

Button's qualifying difficulties really only began at Spain, where he failed to graduate from Q2 after being unable to find a workable balance with his car, something that was repeated in Monaco. Since that time he has been having much greater difficulty than Hamilton in using the tyres effectively. The key to having the tyres ready for a qualifying lap is in matching the temperatures between front and rear. The rears get up to temperature easily, the fronts tend to take longer, potentially giving you an understeer problem early in the lap.

That understeer can promote a loss of traction from the rear, thereby damaging the rear tyres and it can often be that, by the time the front tyres finally come up to temperature, the rears are overheated, so you end the lap with oversteer. The trick is getting the fronts properly up to temperature before the lap begins, and it's something that Button is struggling to do. Something about his very singular driving style simply does not quickly generate front tyre temperature with this generation of car and tyre.

So why was this much less of a problem for him in the earlier races? Jenson and McLaren would probably love to know the answer to that too. But there is at least one key rival convinced it has something to do with an FIA clarification made during the Chinese Grand Prix weekend regarding the McLaren's splitter aft of the nose.

It's believed McLaren was taking advantage of the production tolerance allowed for the floor - which has to be flat but which is allowed a few millimetres tolerance - by considering the splitter as part of the floor. The clarification put a stop to this. McLaren insists this had no serious impact upon the car's aerodynamic performance, but others are less sure. Could it have allowed just enough rake on the car for even Jenson to get the front tyres up to temperature? It's only a theory. But at the time of writing, theories were all even Button and the team had.

http://www1.skysports.com/formula-1/news/22058/7808830/Just-why-has-Button-become-undone-

 

[Smithers]

Very Interesting! Thanks for that.

 

[El_Bando]

What are McLaren doing to help Button this year?

I think this pretty much prooves the car was not built round him for this season

 

[Di Resta is faster than u]

Good points raised here (above).

Button's current, biggest problem is with braking, and is exacerbated at circuits which require very heavy braking. It goes against the rhythm and flow of Button's natural speed. This is the reason he has been finding it difficult to preserve his tyres at circuits such as Monaco and Montreal, in the manner we have been previously familiar with.

Valencia will provide further opportunity for him to work on this critical aspect of his game but is one of the most difficult things for a 'smoothie' to address. Expect better performances from circuits such as Silverstone, Monza, Hungaroring and a few others still ahead of us.

I would have thought Monza defined circuits requiring heavy breaking?

 

[Di Resta is faster than u]

Besides, your assertion about Alonso is continually thrown into doubt by Alonso himself, who fears Hamilton more than anyone else on the grid. He sometimes appears virtually obsessed by the only driver who's beaten him over an F1 season.

Technically Tarso Marques beat him. Alonso's been beaten twice.

 

[ErnieBecclestone]

Good points raised here (above).

Button's current, biggest problem is with braking, and is exacerbated at circuits which require very heavy braking. It goes against the rhythm and flow of Button's natural speed. This is the reason he has been finding it difficult to preserve his tyres at circuits such as Monaco and Montreal, in the manner we have been previously familiar with.

Valencia will provide further opportunity for him to work on this critical aspect of his game but is one of the most difficult things for a 'smoothie' to address. Expect better performances from circuits such as Silverstone, Monza, Hungaroring and a few others still ahead of us.

Perhaps Jenson, had better hot foot his McLaren down to Kwik Fit get a set of new discs and pads, and whils't he's there, put on a set of Goodyears.