Button pleased with Honda's progress

"Looking at the weekend as a whole, we have made good progress and can take a lot away from here," said Button, who started and finished in 12th position at the scene of his only F1 victory so far.

"Unfortunately the race was frustrating. I made it tough for myself with a poor start, which dropped me down to P14 after the first couple of corners. I got boxed in at Turn 1 and had a lot of wheelspin out of the corner, which allowed a few people to get past on the outside.

"I was able to get past Rubens on lap three, which was fun, but after that I quickly came up to the back of Heidfeld. He was very strong on the last two corners so I had no chance to overtake on the track and he was on a one-stop strategy.

"However in clean air, our pace was good, so this weekend is a definite step forward and I am reasonably happy with the outcome," added the Briton, whose team introduced several updates this weekend, including a new rear suspension.

Rubens Barrichello had to settle for 16th position after he suffered a problem with the refuelling rig during his first pitstop.

"After a good start where I made up four positions on the opening lap, unfortunately it wasn't a very exciting race for me," he said. "We decided to start with used front and new rear tyres which proved to be a problem as the car was out of balance for the first stint.

"Then at my first pitstop we were unlucky to have the problem with the rig which resulted in a small fire and a long delay whilst we got fuel into the car using the second rig.

"After that, my race was effectively over as the number of blue flags made it impossible to make progress. We decided to drop the revs on the engine and do some testing with the tyres as we had overheating problems over the weekend and it was good to collect some data on this. For me the actual race was one to forget really."