Jenson Button expects the high temperatures at this weekend's Malaysian Grand Prix to result in a different style of race to the season-opener at Melbourne.
The new Pirelli tyres surprised most of the teams in Australia with their durability, allowing a range of strategies from Sergio Perez's single stop to Ferrari and Mark Webber's three stops. But Sepang is a much harder circuit on tyres than Albert Park and the tyre manufacturer is predicting three or four stop strategies this weekend.
Button believes the higher tyre degradation will result in a completely different style of racing.
"It's a lot hotter and it's a very tough circuit for the cars, the drivers and especially for the four things touching the road," he said in Thursday's press conference. "So I think we are going to see a very different race and mostly because of the tyres in the hot temperatures.
"I think there is possibly going to be more degradation - I think we were all surprised how consistent the tyres were at the first race. I don't think that was the initial idea with the Pirelli tyres to be so consistent. We saw one stop from [Sergio] Perez which was the highlight of the race for a lot of people, how he was able to be so consistent, but I don't think that's going to be the same here. I think it will be very different. It's a lot more demanding and a lot tougher on the tyres. It brings another element into it, which is good I think."
But Button stopped short of predicting whether his McLaren team would be closer to Red Bull this weekend.
"It's very difficult to say," he admitted. "We don't know what other people have been doing over the last two weeks and what they're bringing to this race. But already in Australia I think we should be very happy with the performance that we had compared to what we had in testing and it was the first step really with the package that we had.
"We have some upgrades here which will sort of fine-tune the package we have and give us more lap time and hopefully better consistency. But whether it's enough to challenge the Red Bulls... but there is a lot more that will come into play here."
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