Button: McLaren needs to improve

With rivals Red Bull Racing having locked out the front row of the grid in Spain, and Mark Webber ending up nearly one second clear of Lewis Hamilton, McLaren admitted that it was slightly shell-shocked by the pace of the RB6.

And Button believes the indications from the Barcelona performance shows how much work McLaren must do to its car - especially with F1 heading to aero-dependent tracks like Istanbul soon.

"I am a little bit surprised how quick they are," said Button about Red Bull Racing's performance. "It does mean we do have to go away and look at the areas, and hopefully improve as quickly as possible.

"Monaco is next and then we have some circuits where it is important to have good aero."

Despite the big margin in qualifying, Button is hoping that McLaren's pace in the race will be much closer to Red Bull Racing than it was on Saturday.

"We were nine tenths to one second back in qualifying," he explained. "It is a big margin and I hope it is not like that in the race.

"The car on Friday, even though we weren't happy with the balance, the pace was still reasonably good compared to our competitors - so we hope to be a lot closer in the race. We have to wait and see.

"I am sure we are hoping for an exciting race and hopefully we can get onto them in Turn 1, and maybe have a chance of overtaking, as otherwise it might be quite difficult to go for the win here."