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McLaren driver Lewis Hamilton says he is confident his luck will turn and he will start winning races soon.

The Englishman fought through the field to finish eighth from the back of the grid at the Spanish Grand Prix on Sunday after being demoted from pole because of a technical infringement.

"When things go right, we'll be in a great position," he said.

"It was a huge challenge to come from the back. This race was damage limitation," he added.

"To get a couple of points from where I was, I cannot complain."

Hamilton leaves Spain eight points behind Red Bull's Sebastian Vettel and Ferrari's Fernando Alonso, who are tied on points at the top of the table.

The race was won by Williams driver Pastor Maldonado, who inherited pole position following Hamilton's grid penalty.

Hamilton was stripped of pole when his team told him to stop out on the track after he set his final qualifying time, which had put him at the front of the grid by more than 0.5 seconds.

Human error in the pits meant there was not enough fuel in the car to return with the one litre required by the rules to provide a post-qualifying sample, so the 2008 world champion was disqualified from the process and demoted to the back of the grid.

Running light on fuel gives a pace advantage, and Hamilton was given the standard penalty for a technical infringement.

"We were in the wrong," he said. "It was a subtle mistake and a very big punishment, but we just took it, gritted our teeth and turned our heads to the race."

Hamilton then drove superbly to climb back up the field at the same time as nursing his tyres - he was the only driver in the race to do only two stops.

The 27-year-old said the performance had given him a great deal of satisfaction.

"I'm proud of myself and the team," he said.

"We did a good job today. To come from all the way back there, we cannot complain.

"It was a fantastic race for me trying to manage the tyres at the same time. It was incredibly tough.

"Considering everyone is always talking about how aggressive my driving style is and how much better my team-mate is on tyres than me, today was a good demonstration that they're perhaps wrong."

And he said he had had no difficulty controlling his emotions as he sought to make up places.

"It wasn't a problem," Hamilton said. "I just put [qualifying] behind me and it was another day and another fight.

"It was just like the karting days, when me and my dad and my family went racing. That's what we sometimes had to do, and that's where I learnt to do my overtaking.

Hamilton's team-mate Jenson Button finished one place behind in ninth place after a frustrating weekend in which he struggled to find performance in his car.

"I was just slow," Button said. "To work out why I was slow is a little bit trickier.

"I'm normally very good at looking after tyres and have a pretty good consistency but I can't do that at the moment and I don't know why.

"I'm really struggling with the car and I don't know why."

Button has slipped to sixth in the championship, 16 points behind Vettel and Alonso.

Lotus's Kimi Raikkonen moved up to fourth place following his third-place finish in Spain, with Red Bull's Mark Webber fifth.