Jenson Button is becoming the best-known salesman since Arthur Miller’s tragic Willy Loman. He may not be earning his money on the track – the limitations of his McLaren car do not allow him to – but off it he works tirelessly, not least in his PR offensive.
This is a former world champion who, at 35 and close to the end of his career, finds himself driving a car that he might have picked up in the pages of Auto Trader. But his enthusiasm will not be thwarted, and his smile is infectious, even though it may start to look a little cheesy by the time we get to Abu Dhabi at the end of November.
The ending is likely to be happier for Button than it was for Loman, the protagonist in Miller’s classic Death of a Salesman, who died when he crashed his car, apparently deliberately.
McLaren will be competitive one day but it is likely to be a long haul after they failed, for the third time in three race weekends, to make it to Q2 on a Saturday afternoon, though for Sunday’s Chinese Grand Prix they missed out by just two tenths of a second.
Button, as always, embraces the positives. “Of course I want to win,” he said. “I’ve won a championship, 15 races, and it is tough right now. But Fernando Alonso and I have a team-mate that we can be competitive against, and have a bit of fun out there on the circuit, while we’re trying to build this team into something special.
“To challenge Mercedes, you’ve got to be a manufacturer. That’s exactly the reason for the McLaren-Honda partnership. It’s going to take time, definitely, but at some point you have to make that decision to go in that direction.
“You could say: ‘What about next year or the year after?’ – I do have a two-year contract, so there’s a good chance I’ll be here next year. I enjoy building a team up. And having a team-mate like Fernando – we have so much experience between us – we can really help this team progress throughout the season and next year. And we might win races next year.”
McLaren do not expect to get their act together until the circus comes to Europe next month but it could take a lot longer than that. They came here expecting more, only to find that the other teams had all taken a step forward. Button and Alonso were 17th and 18th respectively, beating only the two cars from the struggling Manor team.
Button added: “It’s always tricky when you start off in the winter with not doing much mileage. I think for everyone it was a big surprise to see us finish in Melbourne. I think for the outside world, they probably didn’t think we made a big step from Melbourne to Malaysia but we did. It was very, very big. We weren’t able to finish the race but we got a lot of useful information. I feel we still haven’t got the best out of what we have right now. A lot of people have asked me how I’m so positive and how the team are so positive and upbeat, and it is because we see a great future. It’s just a lot of hard work now improving before we can get there.”
Meanwhile, Nico Rosberg has accused his Mercedes team of putting him under unnecessary pressure towards the end of Saturday afternoon’s qualifying session. He missed out on pole to his team-mate Lewis Hamilton by just four-hundredths of a second in Shanghai and said he was unhappy with his team’s instruction to speed up on his warm-up lap.
He shouted “Come on guys!” to his team at the end of the session. He explained: “We need to look at that as it was not ideal to put me under pressure like that. I don’t think it cost me anything, but even the mindset to know that I have to speed up a bit … so we need to look into that.”
Hamilton and Rosberg’s presence on the front row reasserted Mercedes’ dominance after Sebastian Vettel’s triumph for Ferrari from second on the grid in the Malaysian Grand Prix two weeks ago. This time, Vettel had to content himself with third, with his Ferrari team-mate Kimi Raikkonen sixth.
