Bourdais: Hard to enjoy team victory

The Frenchman had qualified a career-best fourth on the grid, but lost a lap before the race had even properly got underway when the car stalled.

Teammate Sebastian Vettel, starting from pole position, went on to dominate the race to score his and Toro Rosso's maiden victory.

"It's very difficult to enjoy it with the team in these conditions," Bourdais told autosport.com. "I'm very happy for them but my race was a non-event.

"It looks like we were pretty much set for third place. I don't know if we could have set as good a pace as Sebastian, and I don't want to sound pretentious, but we would have been pretty close."

Bourdais said that he was puzzled by the problem which caused his car to stall and fail to join the queue behind the safety car as the race got underway.

"I couldn't put it in first gear, then when I dropped the clutch the car stalled," said Bourdais. "That never happens because of the anti-stall, but this time it did.

"So I pressed the release and the release button stayed down. So we couldn't put it back into gear and we went a lap down."