It was a productive day of first running for the Honda powered McLaren team in Monte-Carlo on Thursday where Jenson Button returned to the wheel for the first time since retiring from Formula One in November 2016. Button is subbing for the team's regular driver, and Button's former teammate, Fernando Alonso, who is racing in Sunday's Indy 500 in the USA.
Jenson spent the morning session bedding himself in as he put in his fiorst ever laps in the 2017 spec car and evaluating the grip and grunt of the MCL32, before starting to more fully explore the limits in the afternoon's session as the grip on-track increased.
He ended the session 12th, but not before he pulled out a brilliant overtaking move on Lewis Hamilton coming out of the tunnel.
“It was funny when I did the install lap this morning, I had a little giggle to myself. Have I missed it? No, but when you jump in the car, you definitely enjoy the moments that you have. I've really enjoyed practice, both the long and short runs. FP2 was a bit of a struggle to really find my feet with the car,” he said.
“I'm braking so much later than what I'm used to here and carrying so much speed into the corners. Adjusting to that takes time, so with another day with the engineers and a look through the data, I'm confident that I can improve for Saturday.”
“As soon as I exited the pits, everything felt very natural. The weirdest thing is when you're behind a car or when you let a car past, because you look at it and it's gigantic. Then you feel really uncomfortable because you think, maybe I am too close to the barriers. But the car fits well; it fits like a glove.”
“I haven't really thought about where I hope to finish. It's a very mixed-up grid at the moment which I'm sure will all change again on Saturday. I don't expect to be one tenth off the Mercedes cars in qualifying, but the guys understand where I'm coming from. They know what they need to do to improve the car to suit me a little bit more and to give me a little bit more confidence.
“Hopefully we'll see a step in performance on Saturday.”
