McLaren silences the critics

29/07/2012

Mat Coch & Chris Balfe write:

The so-called 'crisis' is over at McLaren after Lewis Hamilton dominated qualifying to secure his twenty-second career pole position in Hungary.

McLaren as a team had been more or less put to the sword after a disastrous British Grand Prix, for the second year in a row, with some media outlets - many of which should have known better - labelling the standard post-event engineer discussions as 'crisis talks'.

Hamilton's pole has hopefully gone a long way to silencing those critics, coming, as it does, off the back of Jenson Button's drive to second place at last weekend's German Grand Prix.

"There's no real explanation for it," says Hamilton of his four-tenth pole advantage. "I just hooked up lots of good laps and from the beginning of this weekend.

"The last race was tough for all the team simply because we had the car to get the result; we had the pace to get a 1-2 probably."

"Lewis has shown all weekend that he's been very, very quick," agreed Button. "For me it was a little bit trickier in qualifying. I struggled a little bit more to get the pace and the balance.

"Fourth isn't too bad, if you can look at it as a bad day and still be fourth I think that's reasonably good."

Button came under fire earlier in the season for a string of comparatively poor results as the 32-year-old struggled to get on top of the Pirelli tyres. "The last three races I've been confident in the car and had a good feeling but only one of those races I've been able to get the result," he explained.
"I wasn't driving differently in Hockenheim I just had a better car underneath me and I think it will be the same here."

With both cars on the front two rows it seems the talks of the crisis at McLaren, including calls for Sporting Director Sam Michael's head on a platter after a handful of difficult pit stops, were somewhat premature. As a result the media vultures are sure to turn their attention elsewhere… for now.