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Sebastien Buemi admits he is desperate for a trouble-free race in Monaco this weekend so he can finally kick-start his season and take advantage of Toro Rosso’s improving pace.

The Swiss rookie has endured a tough start to his second season in Formula 1 and seen the chequered flags just once in five attempts courtesy of a combination of reliability problems and incidents with other drivers.

Last weekend in Spain he broke his front wing in a first-lap coming together with Pedro de la Rosa before later retiring with a hydraulic problem, while team-mate Jaime Alguersuari claimed the final point in 10th.

“It has been a very difficult start to the season for me with all the incidents and we had a lot of technical problems, so I am hoping to have a clean weekend,” Buemi said in Thursday’s pre-race press conference.

“That is most important.

“I am pretty sure we can do it as my team-mate seemed to have a consistent car until the end of the race, so I am hoping to have the same for this race but we will see.”

Buemi reckons the upgrades Toro Rosso brought to Barcelona allowed the team to leapfrog Williams and is optimistic the STR5 will continue to run well on Monaco’s streets.

“Our updates seemed to be working a bit better than expected as we seem to be ahead of Williams and near to Force India at the same level, so this is good for us,” he added.

“Now we need to see on this circuit how it reacts but I think we have a decent car for this kind of circuit.”

The 21-year-old, who qualified 11th in the Principality last year, added: “We were quite competitive last year and we have some new bits coming for here, so it should not be too bad.

“We should be near Q3, 10th space, 11th space, so that will be our objective and to score points.”