San Marino: Jenson Button faces the press

By Phil Huff
April 23 2006

Honda Racing F1's Jenson Button set the second fastest time in Saturday's qualifying session for the San Marino Grand Prix. He then had to face the Fastest Three press conference, and here's what he had to say.

Jenson, a great performance. Not particularly happy with the car yesterday but a great recovery today.

Yeah, you know we've done a lot of work overnight and also during the day and we've really improved it. We needed to because we were quite a long way off yesterday, not just on one lap but also the long run pace. I'm much happier with the car now. We did a reasonably good run in practice also so not a bad position to be in.

And a strong position relative to the Renaults and the McLarens.

Yeah, it's quite interesting. We'll have to see how the race pans out but yeah, they must be stopping very very late or they made mistakes, I don't know. I'm happy with my qualifying and it's great to have Rubens up here as well, for us both to be up here so it's a good start for tomorrow and hopefully we can make good use of it.

You have been on pole here before, so it must be becoming your favourite circuit.

It's a circuit I enjoy very much. It's a beautiful setting, it's very narrow and you have to bounce the car off the kerbs quite a bit. I enjoy it – it's a circuit I've always gone very well at. Yeah, it's always gone well for me here.

We've seen you qualifying very well but not being so good on race pace. How confident are you for tomorrow?

It just shows what we've been doing in testing. We had some good runs today and we just have to see tomorrow, but we're reasonably happy that we've solved some of our issues and whether we have completely solved them – we'll just have to wait and see.

Are we going to see a vast improvement for the rest of the season?

I'm hoping, yeah. I know I'm smiling, but it is only qualifying. Tomorrow's the important day and hopefully we have quite a good car for the race and I'm sure we've made enough improvements.

People were complaining about a lack of grip yesterday. How much better was it today?

It was a bit better today with the grip level – maybe it was because of higher temperatures. I've struggled to get a set-up with the car, I struggled especially yesterday, and today also it's been tough, but we found a set-up that works and I'm positive for tomorrow, but it hasn't been an easy day for myself.

High hopes then?

Today's been going well, so hopefully we'll continue tomorrow.

The key question seems to be tyre temperatures. Do you think that you found the solutions in the long runs that you did yesterday and this morning?

The issues we had in Melbourne with the tyre temperatures and the tyre grip, I think we've solved a lot of the issues and I don't think we're going to have a problem here. The temperatures seem to be very good all weekend so I don't think we'll have an issue but you never know. We've got to wait and see. It's difficult. We hadn't driven in such cold conditions like Melbourne so it's difficult to see if we have solved the problems completely.

Is it a problem that there seems to be a very narrow temperature range with the tyres this year, and this is perhaps hotter than you thought it was going to be?

No, I think this is good for us. The hotter temperatures seem to work for us as a team and also for Michelin so I'm happy that the temperature has been good here, it's been the best for quite a few years here in Imola, I think, so it's positive for us and also for Michelin, so we're very happy.