Vodafone McLaren Mercedes sporting director Sam Michael feels that scoring the team's first podium finish of the season is unlikely.
If his prediction is correct, this will be the first season since 1980 that the Woking based squad failed to score a podium.
The struggling squad felt that the Belgian Grand Prix could prove to be the turning point of their season, but Button could only manage a sixth place finish.
Despite making a step forward, the team feel that the chance of scoring that illusive first podium of the year is slipping away.
Speaking in a Vodafone teleconference Sam Michael said: ""If you look at the last couple of races, Budapest and Spa, we have improved our performance."
"It's not where we need to be as McLaren but previous to those last two races we didn't have the ability to run with some of the top cars and challenge them."
He concedes that there is still a sizable gap to the teams in front that they have failed to close up: "But there is still a gap between us and Red Bull and a decent gap to Mercedes as well. If you look at the other teams, such as Lotus and Ferrari, we are getting close there.
"Spa was a good one for us and we finished sixth there on merit, no one dropped out and there was nothing unusual about the race that resulted in us inheriting positions. It was done on pace. Monza should be good for us as well."
Despite encouraging signs, he feels that if the team did manage to score a podium finish, it wouldn't be on merit: "It will be difficult to score a podium based on full merit between now and the end of the year, particularly as we start to concentrate a lot on the 2014 car.
"Although we are still bringing parts to this car, they are not the normal iterative developments you would bring if you were pushing in a performance race - they are as a result of studies for 2014, which can still be quite effective but they are less known in terms of looking forward three or four races knowing exactly what's coming.
"So to predict a podium before the end of the year, it's quite tricky to know where that would happen, but we will keep pushing to make that happen until the last race."
However he feels that it has been an important lesson for McLaren and will help the team to avoid similar situations in the future.
"The main thing is to fully understand where we went wrong," he said. "We have got a pretty firm handle on that now with not as much ability to change that in the season as we would like.
"However, as long as we understand that, we should be able to avoid that error in the future. That's definitely been a big focus internally at McLaren.
"We know what we are doing going forward and the team of guys that designed this car are the same guys that did the [successful] cars previously. I've got every confidence that they can do the same next year."
The team, who recently celebrated their 50th anniversary and will continue the celebrations over the Italian Grand Prix weekend, only recently moved ahead of Force India - a considerably smaller team - to take fifth in the constructor's standings.
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| (c) Vodafone McLaren Mercedes |
The struggling squad felt that the Belgian Grand Prix could prove to be the turning point of their season, but Button could only manage a sixth place finish.
Despite making a step forward, the team feel that the chance of scoring that illusive first podium of the year is slipping away.
Speaking in a Vodafone teleconference Sam Michael said: ""If you look at the last couple of races, Budapest and Spa, we have improved our performance."
"It's not where we need to be as McLaren but previous to those last two races we didn't have the ability to run with some of the top cars and challenge them."
He concedes that there is still a sizable gap to the teams in front that they have failed to close up: "But there is still a gap between us and Red Bull and a decent gap to Mercedes as well. If you look at the other teams, such as Lotus and Ferrari, we are getting close there.
"Spa was a good one for us and we finished sixth there on merit, no one dropped out and there was nothing unusual about the race that resulted in us inheriting positions. It was done on pace. Monza should be good for us as well."
Despite encouraging signs, he feels that if the team did manage to score a podium finish, it wouldn't be on merit: "It will be difficult to score a podium based on full merit between now and the end of the year, particularly as we start to concentrate a lot on the 2014 car.
"Although we are still bringing parts to this car, they are not the normal iterative developments you would bring if you were pushing in a performance race - they are as a result of studies for 2014, which can still be quite effective but they are less known in terms of looking forward three or four races knowing exactly what's coming.
"So to predict a podium before the end of the year, it's quite tricky to know where that would happen, but we will keep pushing to make that happen until the last race."
However he feels that it has been an important lesson for McLaren and will help the team to avoid similar situations in the future.
"The main thing is to fully understand where we went wrong," he said. "We have got a pretty firm handle on that now with not as much ability to change that in the season as we would like.
"However, as long as we understand that, we should be able to avoid that error in the future. That's definitely been a big focus internally at McLaren.
"We know what we are doing going forward and the team of guys that designed this car are the same guys that did the [successful] cars previously. I've got every confidence that they can do the same next year."
The team, who recently celebrated their 50th anniversary and will continue the celebrations over the Italian Grand Prix weekend, only recently moved ahead of Force India - a considerably smaller team - to take fifth in the constructor's standings.
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