F1 United States Grand Prix: Button: I want Alonso to annihilate me!

Fernando Alonso is confident that Honda’s latest engine upgrade will give McLaren a boost, although with rain forecast at the US GP, he is not sure whether they will get the chance to gauge any improvement this weekend.

Two-time world champion Alonso will be the driver given an upgraded “Specification Four” Honda engine for the entire weekend while Button continues to run with the Japanese company’s older unit.

“Normally when you are team-mates you want exactly the same, but I’m hoping it is a good upgrade, he’s really quick and he annihilates me all weekend”, Button said.

“When you’re fighting for a world championship or at the front, everything has to be the same”.

“But in our situation it’s about getting it on the auto, proving it out reliability wise, and I’ll have the same engine at the next race”.

Button is scheduled to have one of the newer engines in his vehicle for the Mexican Grand Prix.

“In a way we sort of did win, because we got the best out of the auto and we made the right calls”, he said. Now I’ve said that, we probably won’t score points, but in Sochi we scored points because we were reliable and we did nothing wrong. “But to compare one spec to the other will be a little bit more hard and also in terms of comparing upgrades on the aerodynamic side, it’s hard because you don’t have the same conditions”. We need to go away and look at why.

“It could be tricky”.

Alonso believes his position early in the wet FP3 session was a more accurate representation of McLaren’s competitiveness than the 14th place he occupied by the end of the session. “It’s something that Honda has been asking for all year long, so I think this is good news for us, good news for Renault, I guess, and for Ferrari”.

“Our pace was nowhere near what we expected here”, said Button.

Bad weather “should be an opportunity for us”, added Alonso. We are working on that, we understood that, and we are trying our best.