Given that McLaren had high hopes for their home Grand Prix at Silverstone this weekend, you may expect Lewis Hamilton to be a tad disappointed with 4th place. However, the former world champion is delighted with his starting position on the grid.
“Fourth position makes me happy like you wouldn’t believe!” Hamilton said. “And I’m so proud of my team. They’ve been pushing so hard all year, but in the last couple of weeks, they’ve pushed longer and harder than ever to get the upgrade package here.
“The new parts are an improvement, but we just weren’t able to get them all to work properly yesterday. And while that meant we had to take most of them off last night, the team still did a remarkable job to get us ready for qualifying this afternoon.
“We knew we were some way off the Red Bulls on sheer pace, so my grid position was really down to getting as good a lap as possible around here.
“And, honestly, I reckon this is the best lap I’ve ever done – and it’s down to all the fans around here: the support around this track is like nowhere else. British race fans are the best by far. I had to nail that lap as if my life depended on it – and I don’t know how I managed to get so far up the grid. I’m so happy. The guys in front are faster than us, but this race isn’t over.”
Hamilton’s teammate Jenson Button was not as happy, as he could only manage 14th in a session which he described as ‘very, very disappointing.’ The Brit said there was something not quite right with his MP4-25, despite feeling fine in the morning’s practice session.
“This morning the car was really good, so it felt like there was something wrong this afternoon,” Button commented. “I don’t yet know if there’s an issue, but the car felt very strange. I had to take enormous amounts of front wing out, and I don’t know why. We had a similar problem finding a good balance on Friday.
“We removed the blown diffuser overnight, and I’m comfortable that that was the right decision. It wouldn’t have been right to run it here. But we’ve still got some aero upgrades on the car – a new front wing – and they’re working really well.
“While it’s true that we didn’t have too much practice with the [normal] exhaust system, things were reasonably good in P3, and I still felt like we could do a reasonable job in qualifying this afternoon. So P14 is very, very disappointing for me.”
