Button satisfied despite no points

Jenson Button felt satisfied with his tenth place in the Malaysian Grand Prix, as he reckons it was the best he could have done.

“It was good to finish the full race distance today and we will get a lot of very useful information from this weekend,” said Button, who had retired from the Australian Grand Prix a week ago.

“I`m pretty satisfied with 10th place as that is where the performance of the car is right now. With the majority of cars ahead of us also finishing, it is a good reflection of our overall position.”

Despite not scoring any points, Button feels Honda are making progress.

“We`re going in the right direction and learning more about the car all the time, so we need to keep up the hard work and continue to develop ahead of the next race in two weeks` time,” added the Briton.

Teammate Rubens Barrichello, who had finished in the points in Australia before he was disqualified, had a difficult day after struggling with his car`s balance.

The Brazilian felt the time lost during Friday`s practice was key to his problems, but he was still encouraged by Honda`s reliability.

“Unfortunately my weekend was compromised when we lost the free practice running on Saturday morning, as I lacked balance in the car for the race today,” he said.

“I had a lot of understeer and was battling with that throughout the race. The drive-through penalty after my second stop was unfortunate, even though I only lost one place, as the markings in the pitlane to indicate where the speed limit ends were not clear enough.

“We have learnt a great deal from the past two weeks and I have been very encouraged by our reliability. We still have a lot of work to do on the performance but that will come through our development programme over the coming weeks in preparation for Europe.

“We are quite competitive within the very tight midfield group and it is encouraging to see that both cars made it through a very tough race today. We will learn from our experiences, both positive and negative, and I am confident that we will continue to improve over the next few races.”

23.3.2008   ▪ Formula One    ▪ Button    ▪ www.autosport.com