Lewis Hamilton struck the first blow in the McLaren ‘Battle of Britain’, as he outpaced team-mate Jenson Button in qualifying for the Bahrain Grand Prix.

The 2008 champion won the opening round of his private in-team rivalry with fellow Briton and defending champion Button and then revealed he was “overwhelmed” to secure fourth position on the grid for today’s race.

But Hamilton also admitted he lacked the speed to do much better.

“I was actually surprised with fourth,” Hamilton said. “We generally don’t have the same pace as the Red Bulls and the Ferraris so I was really surprised when I came through in that position. It’s good.

“I saw that I was P4 but I didn’t know that there were loads of people behind me. To be honest, I am absolutely overwhelmed with that position. “I think that’s great for us, a great starting point and I hope today we can just either keep that position or take one more.”

But team-mate Button said his car “felt wrong” and needed to be looked at by the team after he finished eighth and nearly 1.5 seconds slower than the best lap time posted by pole-sitting German Sebastian Vettel of Red Bull.

“I struggled with wheels locking up in this afternoon’s session and although I felt things were improving, there was something wrong with the car. We need to look at the car and see what it is,” said Button, who put on a brave face, but was clearly desperately disappointed not to be truly competitive at the front of the field.

“Lewis is up in fourth which is not such a bad position, but when you look at the difference in lap time to P1 it’s massive - over one second - so it’s a big surprise. I think Red Bull are very, very fast and even the Ferraris couldn’t stay with them in qualifying. “My first run in Q2, I was in traffic and the second one was a bit better. It was getting better and better every lap so I was reasonably happy but at the end of the day, it wasn’t so good.”

Hamilton agreed with Button that the McLaren car lacked pace and he pointed to a lack of downforce as the main problem.

“We are generally quite weak in the middle sector here and I think we lose almost a second there. For me, that means we have got a lot of downforce to find,” he added.