A sensor on the intake system of Jenson Button's McLaren-Honda resulted in his loss of power and eventual retirement from the Austrian Grand Prix.
Button retired after nine laps when his car suffered a sudden loss of power, which the team later identified as a faulty sensor rather than a failure. Nevertheless, the car was retired as a precaution in the hope of protecting the power unit.
"As for Jenson's car, there was an intake system sensor failure, which limited the power, so we elected to retire the car," Honda boss Yasuhisa Arai said. "We know that reliability is still an issue, and it is our priority to improve at every race. We will ready ourselves for Silverstone, including power output updates."
Button added: "I don't know what's worse really, doing the whole race 30 seconds off the back of the field or stopping on lap two! It's a pity obviously reliability-wise. I don't think we've broken anything but there was something wrong so it could have gone that way. So that's the reason why we stopped. They were telling me to do switch changes and everything and then they called me in in the end because they hadn't made a difference."