McLaren duo happy to rescue points

Date published : 04 Apr 2010 - 12:00:03

The McLaren drivers felt they had salvaged the maximum possible from the Malaysian Grand Prix, as Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button recovered from the qualifying strategy mistakes that left them 20th and 17th on the grid to take sixth and eighth places.Hamilton ran as high as second for a while as he ran long into the race before his pit stop."I'm very happy with that, I couldn't ask for any more than 20th to sixth," he said."It's a great result for me."In the closing stages Hamilton was all over the back of his close friend Adrian Sutil, but the Force India driver was able to hang on to fifth."They've always been quite quick, they've got the same engine," Hamilton said of Force India. "I tried my best to get past him but he drove a fantastic race and was faultless."Button pitted as early as lap 10, and was briefly alongside Hamilton as the latter rejoined after his stop, but then fell away as his tyres faded.The reigning champion admitted his strategy choice probably hadn't been the right one - and neither had his handling of the start."I got a really good start and then went down to turn one and thought the outside was a good move - and it blatently wasn't, it was very slippery out there and I lost a lot of places, and also got my tyres very dirty," said Jenson."Then I was stuck behind Fernando [Alonso] for a few laps and had massive oversteer with that tyre and was really struggle with it, so I said to the team 'let's pit as early as we can'."That meant we had to do a lot of laps on the prime, and it was very, very tough."Eventually [Felipe] Massa got past me and then I had Fernando all over the back of me."It was a pretty tough race to finish eighth, but I'm happy with the result."Lewis did a great job to finish sixth, we went completely different ways on the strategy and I think I made the wrong tyre choice."But we got some reasonable points considering where we started."