McLaren braced for poor qualifying

The Briton suffered car problems in both practice sessions, which hampered McLaren's planned aerodynamic programme.

Although team-mate Fernando Alonso ended up seventh and 12th in the two sessions, Button thinks that when rivals turn up their power units for qualifying his outfit will be left behind again.

"I think some teams runs high fuel all day today as well, so it is not going to be easy," he said. "We are not kidding ourselves. We know what it was like in China.

"The long run pace is OK but quite similar to China.

"Hopefully we don't have any issues so I can get some running in tomorrow, because if you are thrown in the deep end here, it can be quite tricky because of the braking."

Button reckoned it was the first time in his career that he had stopped in both practice sessions on a Friday, with Honda explaining the two stoppages had been caused by different factors.

Honda motorsport boss Yasuhisa Arai said: "We were limited on running time owing to an electrical shutdown in FP1.

"We were able to put the car back on the track for FP2, but the control data that monitors the power unit status was unstable and we had to bring the car back to the garage several times, which was unfortunate.

"We'll need to utilise tomorrow's FP3 to set the control data for qualifying."