Button's message for the weekend

Jenson Button has a message for his McLaren team at this weekend’s Canadian Grand Prix: “hands off my car!” The reigning world champion knows a thing or two about the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve in Montreal, having started from the front row of the grid twice and finished on the podium in 2004, and he believes the best strategy for success is not to touch the set-up of his car.

“The track isn’t used very much during the year,” says Jenson. “The surface is very slippery to begin with and during the first practice session you think, “Oh my god, this feels awful”. But the grip improves dramatically as the rubber goes down and the key is not to change the car. If you go crazy with car set-up, you’ll get lost because you won’t know whether an improvement is due to the car or the track conditions. You want to keep a similar set-up throughout the weekend.”

Jenson and his McLaren team-mate Lewis Hamilton will start – and in Jenson’s case finish – the race weekend with car set-ups derived from McLaren’s simulator in Woking. Jenson tested the simulator at the end of last week, after picking up his MBE from Her Majesty The Queen at Buckingham Palace, and he was pleased with the results.

“There’s nothing better than driving a track for real,” he says. “But the simulator allows us to arrive in Montreal with a pretty accurate idea of set-up – suspension settings, wing levels and gear ratios. We can hit the ground running when the on-track action starts on Friday.

“What we won’t know until we get there is how much they’ve changed the track since the last Canadian Grand Prix in 2008. Will the kerbs be the same? Have they done any re-surfacing work? Will the walls be in the same places? I’ll only get answers to these questions when I do my track walk on Thursday afternoon.”

We can reveal that the ‘Wall of Champions’ will still be on the outside of the final corner, waiting to take out any cars that run wide. Many great champions have hit this unforgiving slab of concrete over the years, including Michael Schumacher, Jacques Villeneuve and Jenson, back in 2005, but there is a shortage of run-off everywhere at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve.

The track is located on the man-made Ile Notre Dame in the middle of the St Lawrence Seaway and the confines of the island mean that there isn’t room to extend the run-off at most corners. As a result, the drivers have to treat the circuit with the respect that they normally reserve for a street track.

“The circuit is very stop-start,” says Jenson, “and there are no fast corners. But that doesn’t make it easy because you need to get your braking points right and you need to hit the kerbs right. If you go too deep into a corner, you’ll get launched over a kerb and risk hitting one of the walls. Like at Monaco, you need to build up your speed; you can’t explore the limits on your first lap.”

Jenson will, however, be exploring his personal limits after he lands in Montreal on Wednesday morning. He’ll don a wetsuit and swim in the rowing lake behind the F1 paddock – as he did in 2008 – in preparation for the London Triathlon in August.

“It’s quite unusual for me to swim in a lake,” says Jenson, “but it will feel great compared to the London docks, which we’ll be using in the triathlon itself. It’ll feel very clean! I’ll be able to get into a good rhythm because I won’t have to stop every 25 metres to change direction, like in a swimming pool. It’ll be a good workout before the serious business of the weekend gets underway.”