Although he has only had a brief glimpse of its potential so far,
Jenson Button is in bullish spirits heading towards the fast-approaching 2008
Formula 1 campaign, after claiming
Honda's new RA108 ‘feels like a proper racing car'.
That may not seem a particularly striking boast, but when it is considered that the Japanese outfit's 2007 challenger – the abject RA107 – failed to even trouble the points-scorers until the eighth race of last season, Button's somewhat unusual manner of description for the new machine starts to become more understandable.
“I'm very excited,” the 28-year-old enthused at the car's launch at Honda's Brackley headquarters. “You always feel excited going into a new season, but I'm especially so this year with the team we now have.
“So far I've only driven the new car for one day, over 80 laps around Valencia. That's not always the best test circuit because it's so tight and twisty, but really it was just reliability and systems checks and everything ran smoothly.
“Testing really starts in Barcelona next week, but there were no big issues. I didn't come in and go ‘wow, this is really unpredictable' which I did last year; I came in and said ‘this car feels like a proper racing car – we just need to work on it because it's not quick enough yet'. Then they told me this was only the basic car and that there would be a lot of changes before the first race which there will be.
“We understand the car; it has been in the wind tunnel, and we understand where we need to improve, which is great. We didn't have that last year; we put it in the wind tunnel and we thought we knew where we had to improve, but every time we did it didn't go any quicker.”
