Button expects McLaren to surprise in Canada

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Jenson Button believes McLaren will perform better at the Canadian Grand Prix than many observers expect thanks to upgrades and the car's characteristics.

Honda is upgrading its turbo while there is also a new fuel from ExxobMobil in Montreal, which should provide additional performance at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve. With McLaren focusing on making its car aerodynamically efficient in order to compensate for its power unit deficit, Button believes Canada should actually suit it fairly well.

"For big points, I think it’s going to be a while before we’re actually going competitive enough to fight for big points, but we are making good progress," Button said. "People would think that this isn’t a circuit that would suit our car, but it’s going to be alright.

"We’ve come here with some upgrades, which should help us. It’s not big but it should help us. We are very efficient in terms of our car. I know that ExxonMobil had been working very hard with Honda with fuel. We have an upgrade here, which should help in that areas, so, yeah, we’re positive."

Team-mate Fernando Alonso agrees McLaren should be targeting a similar level of performance to recent races having qualified in the top ten on the last two occasions.

"I don’t think we have a specific target to achieve here. We want to do our best and it will be a good test on completely different circuit to Barcelona and Monaco where the power effect is a little bit higher here. Hopefully we can still score points, be in Q3 again for the third consecutive time and these sorts of things will become a normality."

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.