Button and Hamilton both hungry for British Grand Prix Success

Defending F1 World Champion Jenson Button has confessed that having triumphed in Monaco and having claimed the crown at the highest level last year, “the one thing missing” from his career CV is victory in front of his adoring partisan supporters in the British Grand Prix at Silverstone – a statistic he hopes to rectify this coming weekend.

To do so, the McLaren-Mercedes star must improve substantially on his previous best finish around the celebrated Home of British Motor Racing, for from ten previous starts there he has yet to take the chequered flag any higher than fourth – and that coming in 2004, during a campaign in which he ascended the podium on no fewer than ten occasions.

Last season, as he sped to world championship glory with Brawn GP, difficulty in getting heat into his tyres on a cool mid-summer afternoon saw Button’s streak of six victories from the opening seven grands prix and an unbroken run of rostrum finishes come to a shuddering and crushingly disappointing halt on home turf, as he could only qualify and finish in a lowly sixth place, whilst Brawn GP team-mate Rubens Barrichello wound up three spots better in third.

Fast forward twelve months, and the 30-year-old is now returning to Silverstone sitting a close second in the title chase, just six points behind McLaren team-mate Lewis Hamilton, and with the Woking-based outfit planning to introduce an upgrade to its MP4-25 – including, most significantly of all, a Red Bull Racing-inspired exhaust-blown rear end – that it is hoped will help to propel the duo to the front of the grid and top of the podium.

Expectations are undeniably high – and so too, therefore, is the pressure upon the two drivers’ shoulders – but rather than crumbling underneath the weight of it as England’s football team arguably did in the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa last month, Button is confident that he will merely be boosted by the fervour as he chases the dream of leading only the second home-grown one-two on British soil in the last 45 years, following on from the 1999 edition when David Coulthard and Eddie Irvine dominated.

“I’ve won in Monaco and I’ve won the world championship, so winning my home grand prix is the one thing that is missing from my CV,” he said.

“We all want to win our home grand prix, but especially the British because there are so many British supporters out there and a lot of British teams.
 

“Racing in front of your home crowd is one of the biggest buzzes for any racing driver, and racing at Silverstone is always an exceptional experience – the crowds are huge throughout the weekend, everybody absolutely knows their stuff and the motivation and support you get is like nowhere else on earth.

However, Button does have competition in the form of British team-mate Lewis Hamilton, who has revealed his ambition to “demolish the field” in next weekend’s Grand Prix to erase his miserable memory from the 2009 event.

This time twelve months ago, Silverstone marked one of the unquestionable nadirs of what was a crushingly disappointing first half to the season for the then defending F1 World Champion, as with inarguably one of the worst cars McLaren has ever built, he qualified on the very back row of the grid and went on to finish a desultory and lapped 16th in front of his adoring partisan supporters from, whose unstinting adulation he always experiences such a lift.

Happily for Hamilton, the saying “what a difference a year makes” could scarcely be more appropriate this time around, as he arrives back on home soil atop the title standings, with a car set to benefit from a substantial upgrade package and palpably fired-up to repeat the kind of dominant performance he put in at Silverstone in 2008 to regain the top step of the rostrum.

“To be leading the world championship going into my home race is a fantastic feeling,” Hamilton said.

“Our whole team is really hungry for success. After spending most of 2009 out of the hunt, I can tell that everybody is really fired-up, particularly for this weekend, where we’ll be performing in front of a home crowd and all our friends and families. It would be amazing to score another great result at our home race. We haven’t raced on this Silverstone configuration before, [but] I’ve looked at the track map and I’ve seen some onboard footage and I like what I’ve seen. It still looks fast and sweeping - even the new corners look medium-to-high-speed, which is what you want around here.”

He added: “I’m sure Jenson does want to win, but it doesn’t mean he wants it more than me, so we’ll have to wait and see.

“Although I’ve won the grand prix before, I’d love to win it again; if he does a better job than me, so be it, but he has to do a better job than me. We’ll race fairly and the fastest guy will win – hopefully a one-two, which would be special, real special.”

Button continued: “I’ve a lot of competition with Lewis because he’s very quick; in the last few races he has finished in front of me, albeit just in front of me, but he has finished in front of me – so I want to win the grand prix.

“So we are going to go out there and have some fun and hopefully one of us will win it.”

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