Senna says not feeling extra pressure

The GP2 championship runner-up made his debut at the wheel of a Formula One car on Monday when he tested for the Honda Racing team at Barcelona.

Senna, nephew of the three-time world champion, is one of the candidates for a race seat at the Japanese squad for 2009.

Despite the hype surrounding him, the 25-year-old said his last name was not adding pressure on him to emulate Ayrton.

"It doesn't. It's my own career," Senna told autosport.com after testing at Barcelona. "I'm doing my own job and no one expects me to be Ayrton. I'm Bruno and that's my career and that's how I treat it."

While Senna admitted his goal for next year is to secure the Honda drive, he acknowledged that it was was still too early to draw any conclusions.

"Obviously, yeah," he said when asked if his target for 2009 was to be in F1. "But you cannot expect a driver who is fully new to a Formula One car to go out and does magic. So today the team wanted me to get comfortable with the car.

"There are quite a few things that you can actually adjust for yourself when you get into a new car. The seat, for example, is not perfect and we still need to work on that.

"Now we know what we need and I'm going to work on that so on Wednesday I have the opportunity to push a bit harder and find the limits."

Senna finished as 15th quickest out of 17 drivers, and over a second ahead of Lucas di Grassi, the Renault test driver who also drove for Honda yesterday.

The Brazilian admitted he was initially overwhelmed by the whole situation when he came out of the pits for the first time.

"It has been two months since I've driven a single-seater or any race car, so the first time out it was a bit overwhelming with all the functions and the power and everything," he said.

"And I hadn't driven a car with tyre warmers so I didn't know what type of grip to expect. It was all new information so I tried to take it in as quickly as I could.

"It was very good to go out. It was a very strange feeling to drive around with F1 cars around me and also to see F1 cars with so many types of different wings and slicks tyres. When I saw the Ferrari I thought it was a GP2 car painted red so that was very different.

"It's the first test so there is a long way to go still. But if I can be successful in Formula One is going to be very special for me, for sure."

Senna will return to the track on Wednesday, when he will be allowed to test with new tyres.