Button: Give F1 2010 time to improve

The first race of the new no-refuelling era was largely resolved in the single early pitstops, and would have been settled by lap 17 of 49 had early leader Sebastian Vettel not lost power and fallen from first to fourth.

"I think that even if you had won the race, you would have thought 'where was the action?'," Button was quoted as saying by Reuters. "It's a sport that I love and it's tough to see a procession."

He hopes that the lack of action at Sakhir will prove to be just a blip.

"I'm not going to say 'What are we going to do about it? It's terrible' because I think we've got to wait and see," said Button.

"It's only one race in, so it's not the end of the world. There's still another 18 races to go. There's still every chance it's going to be a fantastic season.

"We just have to see what happens over the next few races and then people have got to start making the decisions if it's not going in the right direction."

Lewis Hamilton is optimistic that next weekend's Melbourne race will be more entertaining purely because of the nature of the circuit.

"You've got assume that the next race will be more exciting," he said.

"There will be more people there, there should be more of an atmosphere in Australia as there always is. The track should be more favourable to the cars, it is a street circuit so it's not the easiest place to overtake but it should be more exciting."

Button reckons the feverish pre-season excitement generated by the winter driver moves, the return of Michael Schumacher and the rule changes made Bahrain more of an anti-climax than would have been the case had there been less hype about the 2010 field.

"I think we all put a lot of pressure on ourselves in Bahrain because everyone was saying 'it's going to be the best year ever in Formula 1' so we put the pressure on ourselves to perform," Button said. "But it wasn't an exciting race to watch."

He reckons the 2009 season saw the ideal level of excitement and overtaking.

"Even last year, people were saying that the racing can be boring, there isn't enough overtaking. But for me last year the balance was good," said Button.

"You had overtaking, not a lot, but you had overtaking and when you did make a move it was a hell of a move and it was exciting."

He added that while the race format might require tweaking to ensure excitement, he was delighted with the return of low fuel qualifying right through to Q3.

"I think that's great. In that area we've really made a step forward, having low fuel and cars on the limit with low fuel," Button said.

"There are positives but maybe there aren't enough right now. We've got to hope we get them in Melbourne."