30 July 2010 - Jenson Button will quit Formula One if team orders become widespread. Ferrari caused outrage last weekend when they appeared to tell Felipe Massa to relinquish the lead at Hockenheim to allow championship challenger Fernando Alonso to take the victory.
The Italian team were fined $100,000 and could still be stripped of the points at an FIA hearing. But reigning world champion Button, who is battling McLaren team-mate and 2008 champ Lewis Hamilton at the top of the standings, says he would stop driving if anybody told him what to do on the track.
I wouldn’t be interested in racing in F1 if, from the first race, you know there was the possibility of being a No.1 or No.2 driver"What’s the point? You’re here to win, to be the best, and you should have equal opportunity to the next guy that’s driving the same car. He should also get every opportunity otherwise it’s not a drivers’ sport any more, it would be a complete and utter team sport. For me, if it wasn’t down to the individual, I wouldn’t be interested in racing any more. One of the biggest buzzes in F1 is fighting your team-mate, and for me, fighting a world champion is such a buzz."
"If I suddenly realised he didn’t have the same equipment as me, or I was being favoured, then I wouldn’t be happy about that because I would think we’d all been cheated. When you cross the line you want to know you’ve won a race and a championship in the right way. “It does mean a lot to you, and I’ve never done it any other way.”
Button was forced to settle for the ninth fastest time yesterday during practice for tomorrow’s Hungarian Grand Prix, more than 1.5secs behind Sebastian Vettel. The German outpaced Alonso by half a second, with his Red Bull team-mate Mark Webber third quickest.
Massa, back at Hungaroring after nearly being killed here last year, was fourth on the charts with Hamilton down in sixth. Red Bull have sealed 10 pole positions out of 11 this season, but Vettel insists it won’t just be between him and Webber in qualifying today. “I think the Ferraris will be very close and you cannot forget the McLarens,” he said.
“It is not just one or two. To be on pole you need to beat more than one or two guys on a grid.” Alonso, who moved to within 34 points of championship leader Hamilton with his controversial victory in Germany last weekend, is keen to cut the gap even more.
The Spaniard said: “All the teams have tried different things and we don’t really know how much faster the others may be than us. We know that we need to do something good if we are to fight for pole position."
“First of all we’ll try to reduce the difference with McLaren and then see if in a few races we can cut the gap to less than 25 points, a one-race difference. We have seen McLaren with problems on Fridays before, but then they score a lot of points. At Silverstone they struggled a lot then fi nished second and fourth.”
Miserable Michael Schumacher endured another miserable session in his Mercedes, posting just the 10th fastest time in practice and admitting he is not hopeful of claiming too many points tomorrow.
“Unfortunately our car does not look very good here at the moment,” he said. “We have to look deeply into the data now to see if there are any specific reasons or if it is due to the character of the circuit."
“I think our specification is better than we had at Silverstone but we have to make it suit this track.”
