Jenson Button has resorted to jokes as McLaren’s farcical delay in announcing its 2015 driver lineup drags on.<\/p>\n
“I have a new Japanese phone number,” said the 2009 world champion.\u00a0 “Maybe that’s why I haven’t heard anything.”<\/p>\n
The British veteran was attending the annual Autosport awards, as was McLaren’s team boss Eric Boullier.<\/p>\n
Amid growing criticism of McLaren’s dithering, Boullier said he hoped the waiting will end within “days”.<\/p>\n
“It’s a matter of days, I hope,” said the Frenchman, “because we all want to know as soon as possible who will work (at McLaren) next year.”<\/p>\n
Ron Dennis, the man most directly responsible for the unmade decision about Fernando Alonso’s Honda-powered teammate, did not attend the event in London.<\/p>\n
Button admitted: “It’s a strange situation.\u00a0 But sometimes in life you find yourself in these situations.\u00a0 You just have to deal with it.”<\/p>\n
Damon Hill, the 1996 world champion, said that despite speculation Kevin Magnussen is the frontrunner for the seat, Button must also still be in the running.<\/p>\n
“I’m sure McLaren are trying their best,” he told Sky, “otherwise one would assume they would have told Jenson ‘We can’t hold on to you, do whatever you need to do’.<\/p>\n
“Likewise if Jenson didn’t think he had a chance he would have told the team that he is off.<\/p>\n
“I suspect there are deals at McLaren that need to be finalised before any decision is announced,” Hill added.<\/p>\n
Finally, new reigning double world champion Lewis Hamilton admitted he is looking forward to racing his old McLaren teammate Alonso in 2015 following the Spaniard’s Ferrari exit.<\/p>\n
“It will be interesting to see what Fernando can do with his car,” Spanish reports quote Hamilton as saying.<\/p>\n
\u00a9 RIF | GMM<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Jenson Button has resorted to jokes as McLaren’s farcical delay in announcing its 2015 driver lineup drags on. “I have a new Japanese phone number,” said the 2009 world champion.\u00a0 “Maybe that’s why I haven’t heard anything.” The British veteran was attending the annual Autosport awards, as was McLaren’s team boss Eric Boullier. Amid growing …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25343,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[3],"tags":[1055,251,5262,149,5340,153,154,5284,880],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26299"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26299"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26299\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26300,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26299\/revisions\/26300"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}