• European Grand Prix

Button confident of better weekend in Valencia

Jenson Button: "Hopefully straight away we'll have a good feeling" © Sutton Images

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• Race:
• European Grand Prix

• Drivers:
• Jenson Button

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• McLaren

Jenson Button is confident he will hit the ground running at the European Grand Prix this weekend as he hopes he has got to the bottom of his setup issues.

Button has failed to score points at the last two races as he has struggled to find a car setup capable of getting his tyres to work properly. For this weekend's race he plans to use a setup similar to team-mate Lewis Hamilton's, and after spending some time in the McLaren's simulator this week he is confident it will put him back on the pace.

"Hopefully straight away we'll have a good feeling," he said on Thursday. "I've done a hell of a lot of laps in the simulator with this setup that we're going to start with so I don't feel it's going to be a massive surprise to me. To be fair, a lot of it is quite similar to what we had at the start of the season so I won't be shocked in any way with the setup so we should be able to get on top of it pretty quickly."

Pirelli's soft and medium compounds will be on offer in Valencia for the third race weekend this season, but Button said it would still be a voyage of discovery to get the best from the tyres.

"You look at Australia and China where we had the same tyres and in Australia there was quite a big difference between the tyres and in China there wasn't a big difference between the tyres," Button said. "It's difficult to know what the difference will be like here because the temperature is going to be higher than both those grands prix and we're hoping it's going to be more like Australia, which it possibly could be. Even taking our issues out of it it's still going to be hard to decide which tyres are going to be best to get the right strategy on Sunday. It's very, very tricky."

But Button remains relatively upbeat about his championship chances this year and said his difficulties on track were not affecting him away from the circuit.

"I probably would have [worried about it] five or six years ago, but I'm at the point in my career now where I'm with a great team and I've won a world championship and many races, and you realise it can't all be good. You have to go through bad times, it can't just all be great and as long as you learn in those difficult times and you improve yourself, which I think you can, I don't think it's a bad thing.

"It will hurt my championship this year, but maybe it's going to be a massive comeback and we're going to win it easy, who knows? I don't come into this race negative and I'm very confident in myself and also in the car and fighting for this championship."

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