Saturday 24 May at 18:49 : The Honda Racing F1 Team will start tomorrow's Monaco Grand Prix from the middle of the grid after a frustrating qualifying session in which both of its drivers were forced to abort their fastest laps in Q2. Jenson Button will start the 78-lap race from 12th place and Rubens Barrichello from 15th.


"We spent the session working on the balance, trying to remove understeer from the car in the high-speed corners, which we achieved and the balance was improving," said Button. "On my last run, the car felt good and I gained almost two-tenths in the first sector on my previous best time, then in the second sector Coulthard had his incident which unfortunately meant I couldn't improve my time because of the yellow flags."

Barrichello commented, "It was certainly a disappointing second session for us. Unfortunately I didn't have a good first run because of traffic and then my second outing was interrupted by the yellow flags. It's a shame as the car was certainly competitive enough to get into Q3. However there is no place for 'if only' in Formula One and we are down in 15th, so it will be a tough race from there."

Head of engineering Steve Clark added, "Because of the wet morning session we elected to do an early run in Q1 on the prime tyre, then use the option for a single lap at the end. This worked well for us with both cars comfortably through to Q2. The second session was always going to be difficult for us as neither driver had a perfect balance on their first run. However changes to the front wing and tyre pressures had improved the car and they were both on a lap fast enough for the top ten when David Coulthard had his accident. We were running very late in the session in order to get the very best track conditions, so an incident at the last moment was a known risk which cost us dear on this occasion."