Jenson Button says McLaren-Honda expects to go through “a long, hard winter” in order to recover from a very tough 2015 campaign.
The much-anticipated reunion between the British team and the Japanese manufacturer has yielded very little in terms of results. Perhaps even more worrying for Button and team-mate and Fernando Alonso is the fact that multiple power unit upgrades do not seem to have cured McLaren-Honda’s engine reliability woes, nor boosted its level of performance.
As the current troublesome season winds up, the 2009 world champion remains well aware of the task at hand in order to cut the gap to the front but remains confident his squad can bounce back in 2016.
“I know we keep saying it, but it is still a very young partnership,” said Button. “We’ve learned so much this year with the power unit, with the idea of the aerodynamics of the car, because it’s very different to a normal McLaren, so there is a lot of learning to take from this season.
“We obviously need to make a big step next year – we know that – so it’s going to be a long, hard winter, but an exciting one as well.
“This winter is a very important one for us, to make those big changes and come out a lot stronger next year because we don’t want to be where we are, we want to be fighting near the front. Whether we can win races or not, that’s another question but I think we can at last fight at the front next year.”
This weekend’s Brazilian Grand Prix sees Button and McLaren return to the scene of their most recent win, with the Briton securing victory at Interlagos in 2012. Since then, the Woking-based outfit has only scored one double podium finish - Australia 2014 with Button and Kevin Magnussen - and gradually slipped down the pecking order. Despite the current slump, the 35-year-old insists they remain a top team.
“We have a lot of strengths and I think everyone knows McLaren and what they’ve achieved. It is still the same team. In terms of what we do on a race weekend, I think we’re doing a very good job, we’re getting the best out of what we have, I think maximising the potential of what we have at the moment.
“There’s a lot of hard work going on and I think another positive with this team is the confidence. Even in difficult times like now there’s still a lot of confidence in the team and they’re still working flat out to improve the car and the power unit, so there’s a good atmosphere, which a lot of people are surprised about but there really is.”
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