McLaren: Button wing all clear for race

The former world champion had his first run in qualifying hit by his rear wing detaching from the floor, and he was then unable to get back out for another attempt after repairs took too long.

It means he will start 17th for his home race on a weekend when McLaren was strong enough to get both its cars in to Q3.

Although the wing failure came after the team elected to fit new parts overnight, racing director Eric Boullier explained that the issue was only minor.

"It will be okay for tomorrow," he said when asked by Motorsport.com about the situation. "It was a small manufacturing issue and that broke the endplate unfortunately.

"That is why on his lap, the endplate broke, he lost rear downforce and the car was unbalanced. To fix it we had to unpop it and unscrew it and it took too long to do it in time."

Button added: "We couldn't get it fixed quite in time – we were out [of Q2] by 3/100ths which is a shame because there was a lot more pace in the car."

Race opportunities

Both Button and Fernando Alonso are optimistic about the potential for a good result in the race, especially with tyre strategies set to throw up some challenges for teams on Sunday.

Alonso said: "I think the situation with the grid order and the strategies will be a little bit of a mix tomorrow, with the people starting in the top ten and the people not.

"So I think we can see some good battles tomorrow and hopefully we can be in the points with both cars at the end of the race and keep this positive trend.

"I missed being in the points for the last few races with some reliability issues, I didn't finish in Baku, I didn't finish in Austria and in Canada we were P11 with not very competitive pace so hopefully we can come back."