Vettel shares the leadership of this year's world championship with three-time champion Lewis Hamilton of Mercedes after two races.
Although Sebastian Vettel topped both practice sessions, the German was not completely happy with his SF70-H and insists Ferrari can still improve.
The afternoon's happenings did not come without dramatics - Lewis Hamilton had to take evasive action to avoid hitting Nico Hulkenberg's slow-moving Renault on a corner. The lap was ruined, and his subsequent effort ended up 0.284s shy of Vettel's and 0.243s off his team-mate's before he focused on race-trim runs. And the surprise news that, rather than test the MCL32 prior to the race - possibly here next week, at a tyre test after the upcoming Spanish GP, or in a Friday morning free practice session in either Russian Federation or Spain, the 2009 world champion will make do with simulator tests at the McLaren factory in Woking.
"He is fit, he is ready, and the simulator is very accurate now and we both believe that it is better for him to spend a couple of days there driving this vehicle model around the streets of Monaco".
"I'm thrilled to be making a one-off return to Formula One, and I couldn't think of a better place to make that return than my adopted home grand prix of Monaco", Button, 37, said.
Hamilton was unhappy with Hulkenberg being in the way while on a slow lap, saying "these drivers are just so risky", over the radio.
So, the mutual respect shown by both Hamilton and Vettel will leave Liberty Media, F1's new owners, fawning over the sport's latest rivalry.
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In the first practice, Hamilton saved his pace and did not push for a leading time.
The session was run in track temperatures of 35 degrees Celsius and air temperatures of 34 degrees, some 14 degrees cooler than it had been in the opening session.
Red Bull's Max Verstappen was third in that, Hamilton 10th, and Bottas 14th.
"It was incredibly hot early on, with some of the very toughest conditions - both physically and in terms of working with the tyres", said Hamilton. "Then it was much cooler, giving us a much better representation of what qualifying and the race will be like".
"I can't explain why the vehicle stopped altogether, but we were able to recover, restart the engine in the garage and, fortunately, it happened at the end of the lap", said Vettel.
"Walking through the desert in 37C heat". Raikkonen, whose nickname is "Iceman", eventually hitched a lift the rest of the way on a scooter.
Binotto described it as "a minor electrical problem" and said Ferrari was "not too worried" about it.
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