Jenson Button’s Canadian weekend went from bad to worse as the British driver endured another painful race performance and subsequent retirement instigated once again by reliability issues affecting his McLaren’s Honda power unit.

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Handicapped from the outset by a tail end grid position and a drive-through penalty associated with the changing of Honda’s MGU-H and turbocharger, Button still put his head down went the lights went green with the aim of at least getting to the checkered flag.

To no avail unfortunately as his running was hindered by excessive fuel consumption and then cut short altogether as his joined team mate Fernando Alonso into retirement.

“It was a difficult day,” Button lamented. “And for me obviously made more difficult from starting last and having a drive-through. Your sort of out of sequence, the leaders lap you, they pull away and then they pit and they lap you again. One of our biggest issues was fuel saving around the lap, and then you lose tyre temperatures as well. The pace on the actual old soft tyres was not too bad.”

Given the Honda unit’s lackluster performance output, Button’s fuel issues were somewhat disconcerting, although many cars struggled with consumption over the course of the 70-lap event.

“If you don’t have the straight-line speed, you use more fuel because you’re on the straight for longer and using full throttle,” Button explained, justifying the consumption issue. “Maybe some of it is efficiency, or too much downforce but we need to solve it for the next one (Austria) because it will also be quite tough with straights, although not as bad as here.”

While Canada appeared as the worst race to date for McLaren in terms of performance, Button insists a massive amount of progress has been made, although the British driver remained elusive as to when a definitive breakthrough in both reliability an performance will be achieved.

“It’s unfair to say it’s been a bad season except for Monaco because we’ve been improving almost every race with at least one of the cars. It was always going to be tough for us here because of the lay-out of the circuit.

“Hopefully we’ll be back on track in Austria where we’ll have some updates. We’re a long way behind the other teams in terms of development with the power unit, also the philosophy behind our car, but if you don’t take a stab at it at the start of the season with a new project like this, you’re never going to fight the top guys.”

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