Button says Honda unlikely to score in Australia

By Alan Baldwin

MELBOURNE (Reuters) - Honda will struggle to score points in Sunday's Formula One season-opener in Australia despite taking a big step forward in testing, their British driver Jenson Button said on Wednesday.

"The great thing is that no-one has a clue where we stand and it's quite exciting," Button told reporters.

"I don't think we are going to be challenging for points but we are going to be a lot closer, actually racing in the mix with the slower part of that middle pack," he added.

Honda won the 2006 Hungarian Grand Prix with Button but had a poor 2007, scoring six points and finishing eighth overall.

Although they have clocked some disappointingly slow times, Honda's final pre-season test in Jerez last week was a private affair at which they ran the aerodynamic package to be used in Melbourne.

"In my 16 years of Formula One...I never had an improvement as big as I had last week," said Brazilian driver Rubens Barrichello. "We did improve the car quite a lot last week."

Button said the good news for the team was finding that the parts tested in the wind tunnel behaved as expected when transferred to the chassis, which he said was now a "proper" racing car.

"If it keeps going the way we think it is going to go and it stays on track then I'll be very happy," he said of the development of the car.