Lewis Hamilton and I playing catch-up with rivals due to new car glitches: Jenson Button

Former Formula One champion Jenson Button has admitted that Lewis Hamilton and he are playing catch-up with rivals because of a series of new car glitches at McLaren.
 
McLaren's MP4-26, which carries the hopes of most British fans, was only introduced at the second of Formula One's pre-season tests.

And since then neither Button nor Hamilton has been able to set the timing screens alight, often losing track time as problems are sorted by engineers, The Sun reports.

Button said it was "obviously a disadvantage" with the first Grand Prix in Bahrain — if it happens amid political unrest — looming large.

The 2009 world champion added: "We are not doing as many laps as we would like. But we are testing a new car so we are a lot of mileage down on most teams. It's something we are addressing and we hope we can get some more mileage."

He added: "We haven't had a lot of time to do set-up work. Most of our running has been to put miles on the car and make sure everything is working correctly."

He said: "I still don't know where we stand. And I think it's unfair to judge us at this point because the amount of laps we have done is not massive. We really need some good days of running to really unlock this car."