“I’d rather it was wet. The inters (intermediate tyres) were very good to
us at the last race,” Button said.
“But in a way it hurt us in the race because it meant we got excited
about qualifying and went for a better position than P10, which we shouldn’t
have done.
“When things go a bit better you think you can achieve more, but that
wasn’t the case.
“So I’d rather it was mixed conditions. I feel we have more of a chance
to score points.
“When you have a quick car you want it to be dry every day, no wind,
calm.
“But when you don’t have such a quick car you want everything thrown at
the rest of the field because then you have an opportunity.”
Button has revealed it was on the final day of testing at Barcelona’s Circuit
de Catalunya the team realised the depth of how far they were behind their
rivals, and the amount of ground they are now trying to make up.
“We didn’t know what fuel the Mercedes had on board, but we were 1.3secs
off and we couldn’t have gone a lot quicker,” Button added.
“It was tricky from that point, but we thought, ‘it’s winter, it’s cold,
maybe it will be better when we get to Melbourne’. But we got there and it
was worse, so it’s been tough.
“Even with a few of the midfield teams that would normally be behind us,
we have been very surprised by how quick some of the cars are – as much as
we’ve been surprised by how we’re not getting performance out of ours.
“We have a reasonable understanding of what we need to do, but we’re not
100 per cent there, so this weekend is going to be another tough one.”