Button: Sainz success will take years

Jenson Button believes that success for Carlos Sainz in Formula 1 will take years. Sainz will leave Renault and the Red Bull junior programme at the end of the season to join McLaren. The Spaniard is replacing his compatriot Fernando Alonso, who is leaving the sport at the end of the year.

McLaren has struggled in F1 for a number of season, failing to produce a race-winning car since 2012. For the 2018 season, the Woking squad ditched Honda power and switched to Renault in search of improved results. However, it currently sits in seventh place in the constructor's standings

And Button, who raced for McLaren from 2010 to 2016 doesn't believe that the pace will improve dramatically next year: "I don't think the pace of the car will change in 2019," Button told El Mundo Deportivo newspaper. "They've fallen too far behind. It's a great team that has won many world championships so they can do it, but it will take time."

Sainz, who is competing in his fourth year of F1 and still in search of his first podium, will have to be patient and wait for the success to come to him, according to the 2009 world champion.

"He will need to understand that it will take a few years of hard work," said the Briton. "He will need to make himself heard and his opinion count, and hopefully bring the car forward. It will always be difficult to replace Fernando, but they wouldn't have chosen him if they didn't believe he deserved it."

McLaren had a torrid three years from 2015 to 2017 when it was running with Honda engines. The car was unreliable and slow on the straights, with the team quick to pin the blame on the Japanese manufacturer. But former Grand Prix driver Marc Surer doesn't believe Honda was poor as McLaren made it out to be. 

"If you look at where they are now, I think Honda was never so bad," he is quoted by AS newspaper. "They'd be exactly where they are if the Honda was still in there. I think the engineers were fooling themselves by thinking they had the best chassis on the grid. They were slowest on the straights and fastest in the corners, but anyone can do that if you have enough downforce on it," Surer added.

Fergal Walsh