BAR claims progress before Imola

Neither Jacques Villeneuve nor Olivier Panis came anywhere near scoring a point in the first three races of the season. The Frenchman has not even managed to notch up a race finish.

Richards said: "We have made some progress with our reliability issues in the Valencia test [last week] and Honda have made a further step forward with the engine for Imola. Our main focus for the weekend has to be extracting the maximum potential from our current package."

Villeneuve reckons there is only a glimmer of optimism ahead of the Imola race. "I'm not expecting to see any major improvement in Imola but we seem to be moving in the right direction," he said. "The car felt a little better on race day in Brazil so hopefully we can build on that this weekend."

Panis said he was "cautiously optimistic" of scoring a good result at the first European race of the season.

As for the future, the team is making it clear that overall expectations are low. New technical director Geoff Willis has completed his initial review of the team and is working on both short-term and long-term performance levels. Richards said: "We have established our performance expectations and everybody is aware that we have a long hard climb ahead of us. Building for the future is going to be a slow process."