Jenson Button says McLaren has "upgrades in every area" but will not be focused on scoring points at the Spanish Grand Prix.

McLaren has been making progress on a race-by-race basis so far this season, but its best result is Fernando Alonso's 11th place in Bahrain. With Honda improving its power unit, Button says there are updates on the chassis side too which he thinks could see it jump a tightly-packed the midfield.

"There’s upgrades in every area really," Button said. "We haven’t come here with a second of lap time, because that just doesn’t happen in Formula One these days, even when you start where we did. It’s a good chunk – there’s upgrades with the power unit, aerodynamically with the car, but also mechanically there are a few things as well, so it’s a good amount.

"It’s getting to the point where it’s a lot more difficult to have the same amount of progress (as previous races) percentage-wise. But we’ll have to see, I think the whole middle pack is very close and for the taking maybe."

And Button says he would rather McLaren is closer to the front but outside the points than in the top ten and further adrift of Mercedes.

"It depends on what other people do. If every other car has a good weekend it’s going to be very difficult to score points. But Fernando out-qualified one Red Bull, one Toro Rosso and one other car as well so it just means other people aren’t getting their weekends together.

"If we can get our weekend together, and they don’t, yes there’s a good chance of scoring a point but if we do we’re not going to be jumping up and down with joy because it’s not our aim. It’s more the gap to the front which is important to us; if the gap is eight tenths smaller or three tenths smaller that’s the thing that really matters to us rather than just P10."

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.

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