Barrichello wants qualifying improvement

The Japanese squad, enduring a dismal start to the season, had a torrid qualifying, with Barrichello failing to make it to the second session and teammate Jenson Button finishing in 15th.

The race proved better for the team, Barrichello going on to finish in 11th position.

Although the Brazilian admitted that's not where Honda want to be, he was somewhat pleased with the result, and he believes they could be closer to the points if they qualified better.

"We can never be happy finishing 11th but compared with what we had in qualifying yesterday I guess we have had a reasonable race today," said Barrichello. "For the last two race weekends we've had a bad qualifying and then the races have shown that we could have been closer to the points had we not suffered on Saturdays.

"For the next race our focus has to be on improving our qualifying performance and that's all we can do to move forward for now."

Teammate Button finished in 12th position after making contact with Spyker's Adrian Sutil early in the race.

"A tough race, as we expected," said Button. "I had a pretty terrible first stint. Sutil drove over the side of my car and there was some damage, although how much of a difference that made I don't know. During the first two stints I was suffering massively due to lack of rear grip.

"We came down quite a bit with the front wing level for the final stint, went miles forward on the brake bias and took some pressure out of the tyres to improve things slightly. We were still only 12th but after yesterday we can consider this a small step forward."