Australia: Button's Qualifying Q&A

By Phil Huff
March 28 2009

Jenson Button followed pole position for the Brawn GP team with a stint in the press room, alongside team mate Rubens Barrichello and Reed Bull's Sebastian Vettel. Here's the complete transcript of Button's contribution...

Jenson, on pole for the first time since Melbourne in 2006. Everyone was tipping you to be on pole or the front row, I guess it was easy.

I wish. The last five or six months for both of us have been so tough because of going from not having a drive or any future in racing to putting it on pole here is just amazing, it really is and I have got to give all credit to the team and Ross (Brawn) and Nick (Fry) for making this happen. This is where we deserve to be after the tough times we have had.

What were your thoughts when you came into qualifying as obviously you had been quick but other cars had been close?

This morning the pace seemed to be pretty good on both tyres and I was reasonably happy. We didn't know what other people's pace was and you don't until you get to qualifying. They seemed to be a little bit closer than I thought actually in Q1 and Q2, they were one or two tenths behind but I was struggling on low fuel for some reason. I just could not get the car working right, but when we put fuel in it, it felt a bit more normal and in a way that is a good thing as it should help us out in the race.

And as a race driver with the year you have had, you come here with a car this competitive. Talk about that transformation and the lap you drove.

It has been a long time since we had a car that has been competitive. It is 2006 since I put it on pole here. It has been very tough and there are a lot of people who stand by you which is fantastic, but there are obviously a few people that don't and they forget and they don't believe. The important thing is that the people within team believe and that is all we care about. We have proven it with this car and I think both of us have done a good job this weekend so far considering the amount of mileage we have had in the car so far. You can say it is a very good car but you still need to get the laps in and make it your own. This is a great moment, but obviously not the most important moment of the weekend but it is a good start.

Shadows and light are going to be an issue tomorrow. Describe that from a driver's point of view and being the first team to be on pole since 1970.

It is difficult here with the shade and the low sun because it is not a normal circuit, it is in a park, so you have got a lot of trees here and the sun shining through the trees makes it very difficult as Sebastian will tell you from yesterday. Turn three was very difficult. It is tough, but it is obviously easier form the front than it is from the back. Regards to what it is for the team to be here on the front row. It is fantastic and it is very difficult to know the words to use really. The team as a unit have been fantastic, they have really stuck together over the tough winter, better than I have, but they have proven that they have stuck together. They have produced a car that is good at the moment but I am sure we can make it a lot better. As we have both said, we will keep going on about, it is well deserved and all credit to the team. There will be a lot of happy faces but not just in the team, I think. A lot of people have travelled this journey with us, so it is good to be here.

Did you ever imagine this could be possible and think after testing we are actually quite good?

I mean testing was good and only having three days in the car and feeling that comfortable with it is quite unusual. But you don't want to get too excited, people always tell you maybe you shouldn't be thinking about going out for the pole or for the win, but why shouldn't you, it doesn't change anything. I think it is good to go into the weekend positive. You don't need to let anyone else know what you are thinking. I came into this weekend positive and I am sure Rubens was the same because we have got a good car and we have got a team that can help us put it on the front row. It has been a good weekend so far. Other teams have been more competitive than I thought they were, so it has been a little bit harder than I expected but you need the competition and it is great to be here on pole position. The last time was three years ago.

This must be a favourite circuit for you?

It isn't really. Qualifying has gone reasonably well for me before, I have just got to hope that it is better than back in 2006. I am expecting it will be. But it is great to be back here and going past the garage just after we weighed and seeing all the guys' faces and the smiles on their faces. I didn't think it still existed because you know it has been two years since we have been in a position where we have come out of the race and thought 'wow that was fantastic.' All credit to them and I need to thank them for all the hard work over the difficult months and roll on the season. I am so excited about this year. It is amazing what you can achieve when you have the package and a team you can believe in.

What is going to be the big issue tomorrow - the tyres or the brakes even?

I have been struggling a little bit with both. The brakes are a little bit of an issue here as it is quite bumpy. I have had a few issues with the pedal going long, but it will be fine, I can cope with it. The tyres are obviously pretty tough, especially in the cooler conditions and it is difficult to get the prime - I call them prime, the harder tyre working - and it is difficult to stop the softer tyre from graining. It is going to be very tough tomorrow and I think tyre management is going to be a big part of the race and that is something we have worked on with this car overnight to manage the tyres a bit better.

You said that you were surprised by how close the others were which means that you were pretty sure it was going to be between you and Rubens.

You always hope that but just looking at testing, I expected the pace to be reasonably good and it was. I don't think I expected it to be bigger but always when there's a car which is only two tenths behind you think that's close. But no, I don't think I really expected us to be much quicker. Yeah, it seemed like there were a lot of cars which were setting the same sort of pace and that's what surprised me more than anything else. There were four or five cars sitting on the same lap time and that was only two tenths behind me.

You're a veteran of Formula One, so on the evidence so far, how extraordinary is the performance of this car and the team, and in the circumstances, does it almost defy belief?

I don't know about belief, but I think you'd have to say that the positive for us was that when we drove the car out in Barcelona for the first time, we had a good idea of where we needed to be with the car mechanically, aero-wise, and we needed that because we've only had six or seven days in the car – whatever it is. The good thing about this team is, when they have a car and they produce the car, the first day in the car you are almost finding the limits of the car and that's great and that's what you need when you go testing.

Obviously we've had to work with cars that have not been so competitive in the past but I think we've proved with this car that it's good out of the box. Also I think that having had two very difficult seasons you start to think about the little things and you need to work on every single area to make that difference to the cars in front, whereas I think that when you're at the front, you might forget about some of those little details and concentrate on the bigger picture.

So for us, I think that coming here with a competitive car is hopefully the start of a good season but we also know that there are some areas in which we need to improve the car still, but the good thing is that we will put time and effort into improving the car in the areas that are maybe smaller than others.

The best car running KERS is in P7 now. Are you surprised by that or do you have an explanation why it is like that here in Melbourne?

The question is where would they be without KERS? We don't know the answer to that one. Who is seventh? I don't know. We haven't got KERS for the obvious reasons. You can say that we can't afford it, that we can't afford to develop it at the moment, so we don't have the system which works well for us, but from what I've heard, people who are running KERS think that there is an advantage of two to three tenths on the circuits that have long straights. This circuit doesn't have long straights and maybe when we get to a circuit like Malaysia we will see that they have a little bit more of an advantage than the cars not running KERS but we obviously have to wait and see for that.