Jenson Button celebrated his 200th Formula One race with victory at a wet Hungarian Grand Prix, which was the second best thing that could happen to championship leader Sebastian Vettel.
Button’s win in Budapest from Vettel and Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso was McLaren’s fourth in 2011 and further underlined that Vettel’s Red Bull team have lost their early-season superiority.
Vettel won five of the first six races, but only one of the following five. However, his worst result is a fourth-place finish as the champion continues to garner important points.
“Button is a magician. Vettel gets a podium finish for the world title,” said Italian paper Corriere dello Sport on Monday.
Vettel further increased his championship lead to now 85 points as Button’s success was the best thing that could happen to him apart from winning himself.
But the German insisted he was not looking at the big picture, where he takes 234 points into the final eight races after a four-week summer holiday, ahead of teammate Mark Webber (149), McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton (146), Alonso (145) and Button (134).
“I think about trying to win. We go out there, we try to get pole on Saturday, we did so yesterday and we try to win on Sunday, which we didn’t do today. I think there has been a chance and we didn’t use it, so we need to look into that,” said Vettel.
“Jenson scored more points today, other people scored less but that’s not really important. There are still so many races to go so our target has to be to win races and I can tell you that we still feel very hungry, I feel very hungry to win races, full stop.” In order to so, better weather could help Red Bull and Ferrari, with Alonso saying that “unfortunately, it was not very hot in July.
We love high temperatures for whatever reason in our car so hopefully August and September will be better for us.” Even Button finally wants to prove his class in dry conditions.
“I would like to win one in the dry, please,” he said. “For some reason I like these conditions, don’t ask me why, but it worked out again.”
