The Painlevé equations arise as reductions of the soliton equations such as the Korteweg–de Vries equation, the nonlinear Schrödinger equation and so on. In this study, we are concerned with numerical approximation of the asymptotics of solutions of the second Painlevé equation on pole‐free intervals along the real axis. Classical integrators such as high order Runge–Kutta schemes might be expensive to simulate oscillation, decay and blow‐up behaviours depending on initial conditions. However, a lower order functional fitting method catches all kinds of solutions even for relatively large step sizes. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.