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Mexican GP: Misfire put McLaren's Jenson Button out of qualifying

Jenson Button was forced to sit out Mexican Grand Prix Formula 1 qualifying due to a misfire caused by a "system failure" in final practice

The McLaren driver lost most of his running on Friday due to ERS deployment problems, and he stopped early in FP3 with an issue that required an engine change.

"We've had a system failure on the engine this morning, a misfire, so we have to change it to make sure everything is OK for tomorrow," said Button.

"It's a shame we weren't able to change it in time for qualifying.

"We didn't know if the misfire would clear up for the race, so we had to change.

"It's been a tough weekend, I've had a lot of problems, so the race is going to be quite tough.

"I've done hardly any laps, but I'll just follow Fernando [Alonso, team-mate] at the start and see how it goes."

Button said he was prepared to accept the reliability problems with the Honda engine because the Japanese firm is making progress in producing more power.

"You'd always go for pace [over reliability]," he said.

"You like to see a step forward, and we do have that here [with the internal combustion engine], but we have other issues we need to solve.

"We keep seeing progress in terms of power output, so I'm not too disappointed."

Alonso will join Button on the back row of the grid, with both McLarens taking engine penalties in Mexico this weekend.

While the Spaniard was eliminated in Q1, he said there was little point in trying to progress through qualifying.

"It doesn't mean much for us because the starting positions will be last," said Alonso.

"So we just put the car on the track, check everything is OK, and hopefully tomorrow we can recover positions.

"There is no point to even be part of qualifying, as we saw with Jenson, so we just [went out to] see how we feel.

"To use a set of tyres and the engine mileage for nothing makes no sense."

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