Jenson Button thinks McLaren could have fought for a spot on the fourth row in Monaco were it not for the ill-timed yellow flags in Q2 which led to his elimination from the session.
Just before the start of Button's final flying lap in Q2 Nico Rosberg ran deep at Sainte Devote and brought out yellow flags. That means Button had to lift through Turn 1 and was chasing the lap time from then on.
In the end, Button finished an agonising 0.094s off the time he needed to avoid the drop zone - meaning he will line up 12th on Sunday. The Englishman's post-Q2 radio message summed up his mood: "Arrrrgggh! We would have made it easily! That's so painful! Such a shame guys, we were on for a reasonable result there."
When asked after qualifying what would have been possible in Q3, Button replied: "I don't know, you never know. There's always ifs and buts and could haves. I lost a lot of time at Turn 1 on my last lap with the yellow flags, I gained most of it back, it would have put us easily through to Q3. It's just one of those things. Today I had a lot of confidence in the car under braking, which is very important around here.
"There's still some areas we can't quite improve and our overall pace isn't quite there, but the overall feel of the car was good so I enjoyed driving it. It was a real shame we had the yellow flag at that point. When you get into Q3 you never know what's going to happen - people make mistakes and there's a lot more pressure on everyone, you can make up more ground. I think seventh and eighth position we could have fought for, whether we could have got that or not I don't know."