'Embarrassing' race for McLaren at Spa

Having racked up 105 place grid penalties between the two drivers for engine changes, McLaren knew that the Belgian Grand Prix would be a struggle. Fernando Alonso was 13th with Jenson Button 14th, despite Honda claiming that the updated engine they brought to Spa would put them on par with Ferrari in terms of power output.

“Painful weekend, to be honest,” said Fernando Alonso, “We were not competitive, and we did a good start from P20 to P13 or 14, so that was the only joy of the race probably, the first lap and the start, and after that we dropped to our natural position and we kept running there.

“At least we finished with both cars, hopefully we’ll get some information for next races.”

Despite outpacing his team mate in qualifying, Button was much slower than Alonso in the race due to an ERS failure.

“We had deployment issues, so it wasn’t deploying as it should and it wasn’t recovering as it should,” Button told Sky Sports F1, “Basically I was doing the whole straight with no deployment. Immediately after the top kerb at Eau Rouge it would cut, so the whole straight was just with petrol engine. So yeah, made it a little bit tough out there, pretty embarrassing to be fair.

“The last eight laps, the guys made it interesting that were lapping me, I was able to have a grandstand view of their race which was the only bit which was fun really.

“I mean the pace isn’t good anyway, as you saw with Fernando, but when you haven’t really got any deployment on the straights, it’s a lot of power these days. I was basically just driving around and keeping it on the black stuff.”

When asked if he was still enjoying Formula One, Button said: “Today? No. Not at all.”

Both drivers, however, were optimistic that later races in the season would play into their hands.

“Monza will be the same. Hopefully, reliability-wise, we’ll be better though. Singapore, which is our A-game if you like, hopefully that’s going to be a good one,” Button said.

“I think Monza will also be quite difficult, tough weekend, but then will come some better races and we have to maximise those opportunities,” Alonso said.

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