Button optimistic for weekend

Despite this, he declared himself happy with sixth fastest time, nearly a second slower than Schuamcher, after the first day's free practice sessions around the famous old street circuit. His team-mate and BAR test driver Anthony Davidson was second fastest however, four tenths slower than the world champion. And with teams using Friday for a variety of programmes not necessarily related to pace these days, Jenson's confidence in the BAR 006 chassis this weekend may still be well founded.

"I think we should feel very happy with what we have achieved today and we're certainly looking good for a strong weekend," said Button. "We have run three cars with no major problems and achieved everything we needed to, particularly with Anthony who has done a great job today.

"We still have a lot of work to do to go through all the data we have acquired from all three cars. As we all know, qualifying well is crucial here and we have to ensure that tomorrow morning's sessions give us the maximum preparation for that. Generally though I think it will be a very interesting weekend."

Davidson is rapidly building a reputation for himself in F1, and is certainly using the higher-revving Honda engine in the test car to full effect. Second fastest time was impressive enough, but when you consider that it was Davidson's first time at Monaco in an F1 car, that puts his efforts into clearer perspective still.

"I've had a really positive debut here today and I'm very pleased with our performance," said Davidson. "It's a fairly tough circuit generally - and quite daunting for the first few laps - but I was really looking forward to getting out there. It's one of those circuits that really moves you as a driver and perhaps more than any other circuit I would really love to be driving here for the rest of the weekend."

Takuma Sato shared his team-mates' optimism for the weekend and ended his free practice sessions seventh overall. "I'm very pleased from a personal point of view and the team has made a good start to the weekend," he said. "It is a very encouraging start and obviously we now need to concentrate on the performance and tyres for tomorrow because qualifying is so important here."