MONTREAL, Canada -- Jenson Button said it was no surprise to him that he was able to set the seventh fastest time during Friday practice at the Canadian Grand Prix.
Button matched Valtteri Bottas' time in the Williams and was less than a tenth off the pace of Max Verstappen's Red Bull in fourth place. On the face of it the lap time represents significant progress from McLaren on a track that requires plenty of power, but Button said he always new the car would be quick in Montreal.
"I said before people would be surprised by our performance on this track and I don't think we'll be worse than we were in Monaco this weekend," he said. "The car feels good but there's still a lot of improvements needed.
"It's very close in the middle of the pack. If I'd gone half a tenth quicker I would have been 4th and if I'd been 0.2s slower I would have been 10th or 12th, so it very close and it will be all about maximizing what we have here.
"We cannot aim to be in the top 5, definitively not. We don't have an engine upgrade, just a new turbo charger and the change was done not for performance but to get more efficiency and it will only benefit us in the race. We also have a new fuel here, which gives a tenth of a second and that obviously helps."
Button completed just eight laps in the morning session after a problem occurred on his newly-fitted Honda engine.
"We had lots of issues this morning, many different issues and it was a very unlucky morning. We actually changed the engine from FP1 to FP2 and the guys did an amazing job. We got out a little bit late but we managed a reasonable amount of running in FP2, so it was not too bad and we ended up in P7.
"The car is enjoyable to drive but there's, obviously a set of issues we need to resolve and we'll be doing that tonight. We put the old engine back in for the afternoon and we had no issues. We just have to decide tonight with what engine we'll run tomorrow, if it's the new one that we put in today or it it's the engine we used in the previous two races - we'll see tonight but either way we'll be fine."