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Jenson Button hopes to hit ground running at the European Grand Prix

Jenson Button thinks he will be able to hit the ground running at Valencia this weekend after abandoning a car set-up direction that McLaren believes contributed to his recent run of bad form

The Briton has scored just two points from the last four races, and a particularly disastrous Canadian GP weekend prompted an in-depth investigation back at the factory to work out exactly what has gone wrong.

With the team believing that his set-up path was to blame, and electing to put Button and team-mate Lewis Hamilton on similar settings for this weekend, the man himself is confident that he can get his season back on track.

"Hopefully straight away we will have a good feeling," he said. "I did a lot of laps in the simulator with the set-up that we are going to start with, so I don't feel it is going to be a massive surprise to me, and to be fair a lot of it is quite similar to what we had at the start of the season. But I won't be shocked in any way with the set-up, so we should get on top of it fairly quickly."

Although Button is reluctant to talk in too much detail about why his set-up direction was problematic, he pinpoints changes he made after the Bahrain GP for what happened.

"You do things to the car that you think are correct, and in a normal world they would be," he said. "But after Bahrain, with the issues we had on the rear end with Bahrain, I tried something different and I thought it would help but I am not sure it was the right direction."

Button also believes that he and the team may actually have some positives come out of his recent troubles - because it has allowed McLaren to understand the performance differential between cars quite well.

"Probably having the last race helped us as a team because we had one car that was extremely quick and Lewis did a great job, but we had one driver and one car that wasn't quick," he said.

"When you look at the difference in lap time, there is a lot of useful information to go through. That is probably something Red Bull had in Bahrain, knowing Mark [Webber] finished a lot closer to Seb [Vettel], but their pace was different.

"It is the only way to learn I think at the moment in F1. With the tyres and situation we have, hopefully it will help us as a team to move forward."

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