Barrichello hopeful of strong race

Barrichello, who struggled to match the pace of his teammate Jenson Button early in the season, continued making progress and outqualified the British driver for the second consecutive race.

The Brazilian will start from fifth position, behind favourites Renault and Ferrari. Button was only eighth today.

"The main proponent is to improve the car and us to push ourselves to the limit so we can improve, you can see that I am a lot happier with my race car and the brakes especially and it is getting better," said Barrichello.

"The first few races I was nowhere and unhappy with the car and now I am happier, we just need to keep on pushing. Today we could not have pipped any of the Ferraris or the Renaults, this is a track that we believe we can be quite fast.

"I believe in our strategy, it is a good strategy so we just have to see for tomorrow."

Although the team have shone in qualifying in the first races of the season, their race pace has been far from that of the top teams. Barrichello believes tomorrow's race will be a good test to see how much they have improved recently.

"The pressure exists not just from the outside but from the inside for us to perform," he added. "But having said that we keep our feet on the ground just to do that, we need to do that. We are not here to be another one and just make our fans a little bit happy, we want to be happy with ourselves as well.

"Everything we do on testing is to improve our race pace that we know we are struggling a little bit so tomorrow is a good test."