Button praises Brawn's turnaround

The British driver had said after yesterday's practice that he did not see his team as favourite for victory this weekend, despite having dominated the Australian Grand Prix last Sunday.

Button struggled with the balance of his car on Friday, but those problems seemed to be gone today, with Button grabbing the top slot.

He admitted he expected the Ferraris to be the cars to beat.

"Looking at yesterday's times, the Ferrari seemed to be the quickest car, so it is a big turnaround today," said Button. "I am very happy with that.

"Tomorrow will be a hot race, it is not the sun, it is the humidity, so I have a cool jacket which has been helping me. I can't wear it in the race as it is too heavy but I am not struggling too much with the heat."

"Yesterday I was struggling with the balance of the car. We changed the car overnight and we have improved it a lot. I feel comfortable in the car and excited for tomorrow."

He added: "You wouldn't believe it if I said yesterday I didn't think we would be here. Last night we had to work on the car a lot.

"Obviously we had good pace but it wasn't to my liking. I think we came to the circuit this morning and had a good car, tweaking it for qualifying, all of the way through qualifying the car was working well."

Button, who had never scored two consecutive pole positions before, said this one felt better than Australia's.

"This one is probably more special than in Melbourne because it is not easy to get one pole position but to have two on the trot, I've never done that before," the Briton said. "I've never achieved that in my F1 career, it shows that the car works on different types of circuit.

"I expected the competition to be pretty tough here, but qualifying was okay for us."

Team-mate Rubens Barrichello completed a strong day for Brawn GP, the Brazilian setting the fourth fastest time. He will lose five places due to a gearbox change, however, and he admitted he was not completely happy with his car's handling.

"We had a fair and square qualifying," Barrichello told the BBC. "I should have qualified on pole and then lost the five places, I think that would have been much better.

"But right now I have a car that is understeering. I don't know where that's coming from, and it's a bit of a sad taste because I couldn't solve that."