Button’s BAR needed a new Honda engine, bringing a 10-place penalty which means the highest he can start tomorrow’s race is 11th.

Button will now reassess his options and is pinning his hopes on a clever strategy to rescue something from the weekend.

He said: “It’s very disappointing. This is a track where I think we have been very happy with our performance in testing so far. We have very good traction and the brake stability seems good.

“Starting 10 places back is going to make it very difficult for me. We need to look into the strategy a bit deeper. It’s such a difficult one.

“We’ll have to put our heads together and hopefully come up with something. It’s much better than Barcelona when I was 14th on the grid after a mistake in qualifying because you can overtake here. It could be quite an exciting race for me.”

While Button was downcast after practice yesterday, Williams driver Juan Pablo Montoya was in more optimistic mood after setting the third-fastest time.

Montoya has battled hard to arrest a recent decline for Williams and his fifth place two weeks ago at Silverstone offered some encouragement.

The Colombian concedes there is still much work to do but approaches this weekend’s race with confidence.

“I think in the last couple of races things have turned a little bit our way,” he said.

“There are a couple of things coming on the car and it is nice to see that but I think that there is still a long way to go to really be fully competitive.

“I think a lot of aerodynamic things are fixed. The car has been pretty good.

“We have new things here again and I think we have started to get a normal rate of development race by race and it is good to see that.

“I think the first six months we just fell back so much that it really cost us.”

Montoya feels Williams’ struggles this season have provided a much-needed shock to a team who are more used to fighting for championships than scrapping for points.

He added: “When things happen with mistakes it is good because it alarms a lot of people and a lot of people, who are making little mistakes, put extra attention to the way they do things.

“It was bad for the team to lose the points but apart from that I think it was good.

“I think it had a positive side in the end. I think when things like that happen you have to look at the positive side and try to learn from the mistakes.”

Montoya was just over a tenth of a second slower than pacesetter Michael Schumacher yesterday, with the German’s lap of one minute 15.001 seconds just 0.044secs faster than McLaren’s Kimi Raikkonen.