Jun.9 (GMM)  Jenson Button has played down claims that McLaren’s risky gamble with its fuel loads was the reason for the near-disaster during the Turkish grand prix.

It has emerged that because Lewis Hamilton and teammate Button chased the Red Bulls so hard at Istanbul Park, the drivers were instructed throughout the race to conserve fuel.

Button’s race engineer at one point described the situation as “critical”, shortly after Hamilton had slowed down too much and triggered their wheel-to-wheel battle for the lead.

Afterwards, Hamilton lamented the poor communication and Button was accused of ignoring veiled team orders, sparking the rejoinder that McLaren could have avoided the entire situation by simply running a less aggressive fuel strategy.

But speaking to the Toronto media on Tuesday, 30-year-old Button said the team is right to run the cars as light on fuel as possible.

“If you’re running with two and a half extra kilos in the car, that’s one tenth a lap, which over the course of the race is five seconds.  So you try to be as close on fuel as possible,” he insisted.

It is believed that Hamilton’s winning car had just one litre of fuel left in the tank after he pulled into parc ferme, while Button’s MP4-25 contained only slightly more.

After humid weather on Wednesday, today there were better conditions that allowed the racing cars to run through the day with dry tires.  Sebastien completed a good number of laps.  Let’s hope the rain forecast for tomorrow is wrong.  The agenda of the Toro Rosso team evaluated some aerodynamic components, tried out several of them and, as the rest of the teams, tested those set-ups with different fuel loads.

The Swiss pilot rolled out three components brought by Bridgestone –the super soft, soft and hard.

“I’m very happy with the last two days and, even though the rain is not an ideal condition, yesterday’s meant we could try out the rain tires,” said Sebastien Buemi.  “Today, we have been able to lap many times with dry weather, and the car is reliable.  We approached several topics and ran with diverse fuel loads, so we are starting to obtain a better understanding of STR5 overall.”

The FIA announced through a press release that it will not publish the fuel loads of the 2010 Formula One season different single-seaters.  Despite this year’s refuel ban all through the Grand Prix, each team’s strategies will not be known before the race nor which single-seaters have a more efficient fuel consumption engine

During the last months, there was speculation regarding the possibility of FIA maintaining the publication of the fuel loads this season, but finally it was decided not to, and the weight of each car will be kept a secret.