Pirelli to return to Bahrain in January

The next private test for 2011 F1 tyre supplier Pirelli will also be in Bahrain.

With the 2009 Toyota and delayed for a day by a sandstorm, test drivers Romain Grosjean and Pedro de la Rosa recently tested at the Sakhir track over five days.

"There’s still some work to do, but we can head into 2011 with confidence," said the marque’s racing boss Paul Hembery. "We ran two drivers in order to compare two different sets of feedback, and the fact that they were both saying the same positive things at the end of the test only underlines the progress that we have made."

After doing 3000 kilometres in Bahrain before Christmas, Pirelli will be back at the desert island on January 9 and 10 before immediately moving to Abu Dhabi for three more test days.

The F1 teams will then do their first group test of 2011 on Pirelli tyres at Valencia from 1 February.