Button fears another long race

The frustrated Honda driver continued with his dismal start to the season in today's practice, where he stopped on track in the afternoon following an engine failure.

Button, still to score a point this year, finished at the bottom of times, over 2.5 seconds off the pace and he is under no illusions for the race.

"The car is the same as it was in Malaysia so it would have been unrealistic for us to expect any improvement on where we were last week," said Button.

"However we aren't as slow as we appeared today because I only had the chance to run on old tyres in the second session before I had the engine failure.

"There is still work we can do on the balance to make the car a little bit better for tomorrow, but we have a lot to do and it's going to be another long hard race."

Teammate Rubens Barrichello enjoyed a more positive outing, the Brazilian posting the 11th fastest time of the day.

Despite that, Barrichello reckons there is still a lot of work to do.

"Obviously we saw a good improvement towards the end of the afternoon and right at the close of the session the car was better than it has been at any other time today," Barrichello said.

"We worked a lot on the car during the two sessions and made some major changes but there is a long way to go yet because we are nowhere near where we need to be with the balance."