Jenson Button 'disappointed' by Lewis Hamilton's tweets revealing qualifying secrets

Hamilton tweeted a photo of the team’s qualifying telemetry, including their relative lap times, in an attempt to illustrate to his followers where he had lost out in electing to run with an older rear wing at Spa.

The 27-year-old was quickly ordered by McLaren to remove the offending tweet but not before a good percentage of his one million-odd followers had copied and disseminated the picture.

“I’ll say disappointed,” Button replied when asked what he felt about the incident. “We work so hard to improve the car and to keep things like that private.”

The incident capped a difficult week for Hamilton, which began with the death of his aunt Diane and ended with his championship hopes badly dented thanks to a multi-car pile-up at the very first corner of the race.

If he was the innocent victim in that instance, there was little sympathy for him with regard to the tweet he sent out before the race, which clearly angered some within the McLaren team at a time when Hamilton is negotiating a contract extension.

Red Bull team principal Christian Horner Bull said after the race that he was sure that “every engineer in the pit-lane would be having a close look at [the picture]” although McLaren insisted on Monday that they would not learn much if they did.

“The actual data in there isn’t going to be any great use to anyone,” said Paddy Lowe, McLaren’s technical director. “I don’t think there is much damage done.

“The actual mistake that Lewis made, which he understands, is that he didn’t really appreciate the nature of that information. The engineers don’t like to see that because we spend our lives trying to keep things like that secret. So it is more what it represents.”

McLaren team principal Martin Whitmarsh confirmed there would be no disciplinary action while in the same breath suggesting Hamilton was fortunate to have escaped further punishment.

“It would be interesting to see how other team principals would deal with it,” Whitmarsh said. “But I think no, it was an error of judgement, it was corrected fairly quickly and apologised for. We move on.”

Button, too, said he would not be taking the matter any further, although he questioned how much time Hamilton actually lost to him as a result of using the older rear wing since the 27 year-old’s higher downforce package also meant that gained time in Spa’s middle sector.

“I think it’s done now,” Button said. “I don’t think it’s for me to be angry with Lewis because it’s not a personal thing.

“The bit about him losing six tenths on the straights isn’t the bit that’s important to me because he should be gaining it back in the corners he’s got more downforce on. And I was eight tenths quicker in qualifying anyway.

“It’s more the information that we work so hard to keep secret and private, that was the thing I didn’t want to see on Twitter.”

The incident also adds a little spice to their intra-team battle after Button faced the indignity of being asked last week, just 11 races into a 20-race season, whether he would be prepared to sacrifice his own personal ambitions to help his team mate’s title bid.

Button, who lies sixth in the championship and trails championship leader Fernando Alonso by 63 points after his victory at the weekend, repeated on Monday that he believed the title was “a long shot” but clearly has Hamilton in his sights and said that he expected to be strong again at Monza this weekend.

“Before I was so out of the picture,” he said. “But one race can really turn it around. I’m 16 points behind Lewis. But I don’t think ‘right, I’ve got to try to beat him in the next race.’ If you start picking people you want to beat it’s more complicated.

"It’s better to get on with it, get your head down and try to win.

“There is no reason why we shouldn’t be confident going to Monza. We don’t know what other people are going to do. Sebastian [Vettel] was quick [in Belgium]. But apart from Sebastian there was no-one else on our pace, really.”