F1 Fanatic

Oh, God. Another Kimi fan has found us. It’s my experience that they will do or say anything to create a scenario whereby Raikkonen will return to Formula 1 and step into a championship-worthy car. Well, I’ve got news for you, Mr. mjpowell – Button is under contract with McLaren until the end of 2012. He’s won two races (McLaren’s first two of the season, I might add) and every time he has finished a race, he has finished in the points.

In short, he’s not going anywhere.

Like I said, he’s under contract until 2012. And he got two race wins before Hamilton got any this season.

Button will remain but he won’t challenge for any more titles by the looks of things. Ah well, so long as McLaren don’t skew the construction of the next car to suit his needs.

Next year just might be Button’s again, if McLaren can design a decent car. I say this because Pirelli’s tyres are thought to produce understeer, which will favour Button.

Button’s had a good year I think. He’s generally been outpaced but even Stewart seemed envious of the style in which JB won at Australia. I was impressed with him at Monza too; he made the right choices and no mistakes that weekend unlike his teammate and was pretty quick and so nearly won. He did do a great qualifying at Suzuka considering the compound he was on it’s just he went the wrong way with strategy.

There doesn’t seem to be any other driver that’s available on the grid who’d really be a much better prospect than Button so he should stay. The only one who might be worth a shot is Kubica but he’s quite a fussy driver too and not as smart as Jenson. Lewis and Jense have a great relationship, on his day Button can be great and he’s wonderful at picking up points and generally keeping out of trouble.

I think the thing with Button that i’ve admired is that he has made very few mistakes. He might have been slow on occasion but has very rarely made an actual mistake. Off the top of my head I can’t think of any – but please correct me if i’m wrong.

He has approached this season very tactically, and its paid off. The reason the two failures at spa and monaco are so striking for Button is that one gets the feeling in both cases he could have bought the car home to get some solid, if unspectacular points. Which would have put him right in the title fight.

Buttons biggest problem this year is that the tyres have been too durable. This has negated his ability to keep them in check for some races – or when he has been able to eek out more performance from them, this comes at the later stage of the race where it is more traditional to hold station than push.

Definitely done more than enough to keep him at McLaren next year and, dare I say it, this year has really cemented that he deserved his championship last year. He’s matched Hamilton in points pretty much and often on the track too in a team that everyone would probably agree ‘emotionally’ supports Hamilton. (though that was more at the beginning than end of the season, the pairing are actually really great together)

Remember my 14-3 stat? It’s now 15-3 to Hamilton. At the end of the race or the time when one of them retired/had a problem, Button has only beaten Hamilton 3 times. I’m still shocked, I thought Button would win three races this year but never because they were the only times he was ahead of his team-mate (well he didn’t win Monza, but he nearly did).

Still, Button is only 23 points behind, which is pretty decent going. But when you consider he’s lost – let’s be generous and say he would have finished 6th in Monaco, but he was never going to keep second in Belgium – 23 points to events outside of his control whereas Hamilton has lost at least 30 if not 42 points (if, like me, you see Singapore as bad luck, considering what you would have expected to happen), that gap is 7 points “too small” (of course, retirements are part and parcel of F1). Add into the fact that Hamilton’s retirements ad car problems elevated Button into getting 6/8 more points than he would have, it starts looking even worse. If you want to play the “should” game, Button’s “real” deficit could be as much as 58 points. I don’t usually play the “should” game because if a car is good enough to make you first than it’s good enough if it lets you down sometimes. But when comparing team-mates, it’s a little more valid.

Still, over a total of 450 possible points, even 58 isn’t a bad margin. This year has just confirmed what we always knew: Jenson is a very good driver, but he needs the car to be able to show it off. Had he been at Red Bull I firmly believe he would be world champion again.

Oh dear, looks like the BBC 606 forum trolls are on their way over here.

As others have said, Button did a pretty good job. Its not like he was way out of contention, won 2 races the same as his team mate.

With a better car next year, it has just lacked the pace in the latter part of the season and not coped well with the tyre wear.