Team reaction after day two in Jerez tests

Ferrari

Second day of testing for Scuderia Ferrari and ten other Formula 1 teams working until Sunday at the Jerez de la Frontera circuit in the south of Spain.

For the second day running, Felipe Massa was at the wheel of the F150th Italia. The Brazilian driver’s programme for the morning centred on analysing the behaviour of the four types of tyre brought here by Pirelli, while in the afternoon, Felipe did long runs of several consecutive laps. All the planned work was completed and now it falls to the engineers to analyse the mass of data gathered from the 116 laps completed. The best time of the day was 1.20.413.

Testing at this circuit continues tomorrow, when Fernando Alonso will be on track.

Toro Rosso Ferrari

Having taken over from Daniel Ricciardo in the cockpit of the STR6 yesterday afternoon, Jaime Alguersuari had the car to himself today. The good weather continued, allowing the team to work through a programme which featured three key elements; tyre evaluation, weight distribution and car set-up work. Sebastien Buemi takes over driving duties tomorrow, for the final two days of this test.

Jaime Alguersuari: “After another day and a half in the car here, following on from last week in Valencia, I feel we have made progress in terms of our understanding of the Pirelli tyres, which was one of our main targets this week. I tried all compounds except the Super-soft here and I had a good feeling from the car with all of them, getting an idea of their different behaviour. I also made progress in terms of using the KERS and the DRS (downforce reduction system) which to be honest, does not look as complicated as I expected it to be. The important thing is that we are making progress every time I go out of the garage. In performance terms, it is still a bit too early to start drawing conclusions, especially as the lap times here vary a lot from the morning to the afternoon, but I am reasonably confident that this side of the car’s progress is on the right track. Of course, there is still a lot of work to do, but now Buemi will drive for another two days, so I expect to find even more improvements when I get back in the car in Barcelona next week.”

Sauber Ferrari

Despite the fact that the second day of testing in Southern Spain came to an end two hours early for the Sauber F1 Team after Sergio Pérez had an accident, it was still a productive day with a lot of work being done.

James Key (Technical Director): "Generally it was going fine today, but unfortunately Sergio had an off in the afternoon. He lost the rear end when he was on hard tyres, but these things happen and are part of the learning process. Overall Sergio made a good step forward. He settled in pretty quickly and gave us a lot of useful information. It was a busy day up to the accident. We have tested chassis set-up directions and were cycling through a number of set-up scans on the car and with the tyres to get further mechanical directions. After we only used three sets of tyres yesterday, we were able to use new sets more often this morning. We did a run through from the hard to the super soft Pirelli compounds. We had no warm up issues with the medium and hard compounds, but we believe we should get more out of the softer ones. Compounds, however, will change. We have checked the car after the incident and have found nothing wrong with it. We will be ready to continue tomorrow."

Sergio Pérez:"I’m fine but I feel sorry for the team, and especially the mechanics, because of the crash. I lost the rear in turn seven and we obviously lost working time. I hope the rest of the test will be good for the team and Kamui, and they cover a lot of mileage. For me it was another day during which I have learnt a lot."

Kamui Kobayashi will take over driving duties for the 12th and 13th February.

Red Bull Renault

Mark Webber was at the wheel of the RB7 again today for day two of Red Bull Racing’s
current test session in Jerez, Southern Spain.

It was another sunny day, with cool early morning temperatures increasing to around 18°C. Notching up 113 laps, the team completed its planned programme for the day.

Ian Morgan, Head of Race Engineering: “We continued to evaluate the new Pirelli tyres today, as well as testing some new aerodynamic components and development parts. It was a productive day; we concentrated on long runs and completed our programme. We’ve had good reliability and Mark’s had a solid two days in the car.”

Mark Webber: “The car ran very well and we’re continuing to learn. It’s very early days at the moment in terms of performance and there’s a long way to go before the first race, but we’ve got some good mileage in, which is important.”

Sebastian will be back in the cockpit tomorrow, as he takes over driving duties for the final
two days of the test.

McLaren Mercedes

This was Jenson’s first day with the MP4-26. As yesterday, when Lewis drove the car for the first time, the morning was largely spent acclimatising to the new car, finding a perfect fit and making small improvements to driver ergonomics and comfort.

After another lunchtime strip-down, the engineers began a more concerted programme of running in the afternoon – albeit one punctuated by several lengthy red-flag stoppages.

At the end of the day, the team evaluated a number of further set-up changes, leaving Jenson – like Lewis - feeling positive about the 26’s potential. These changes will be further pursued when Jenson returns to the car on Sunday. Lewis returns to the cockpit on Saturday.

Jenson Button: “The morning was spent getting me satisfactorily fitted in the car, adapting to the hybrid – which is new to me – and getting used to how the system works. I like the power boost it gives you.

“I felt a lot more comfortable with the car at the end of the day after we’d played around with a few things in the cockpit. We’ve made some good progress.

“And we’ve tried the different Pirelli tyres – there are big differences across the compound range; not only in terms of laptime, but also with degradation and durability. It’s going to be fun for racing, I think, and it’s what everyone wanted. The TV viewers will certainly know the differences between the tyres.

“It’s been a good first day. On Sunday, I hope we can start to have a crack at seeing what the car really has in it.”

Mercedes GP

Michael Schumacher took over the MGP W02 car in Jerez today for the second day of this week’s test programme.

Running with the Mercedes KERS operational throughout the day to continue Michael’s familiarisation process, the team focused on system checks with shorter runs in the early part of the day, before progressing to set-up work and tyre evaluations with the medium and super soft Pirelli tyre compounds over longer runs.

With good reliability and mileage accumulation, Michael and the team had a productive day covering 112 laps. Michael will continue the programme tomorrow with Nico taking over on Sunday.

Michael Schumacher: “It clearly was a productive day, and obviously I am happy about that. We were focusing on long runs and being able to produce such a lot of mileage is positive in terms of reliability. It also gives us good data for the test days to come and for the developments we are working on. We are moving forward as we should during the testing period but at the same time, we are aware we have to keep pushing.”

Virgin Racing Cosworth

Another hot and sunny day in the south of Spain greeted Marussia Virgin Racing as Timo Glock resumed testing in the new MVR-02. Today was his second and final day of testing at the Circuito de Velocidad in Jerez and he was able to complete 57 laps and continue familiarising himself with the new car.

The team deployed its new moveable rear wing for the first time today, so the focus of the programme was understanding the car’s behaviour with it. Timo added more mileage to the car and continued to work with the new Pirelli tyres.

Tomorrow it will be Jerome D’Ambrosio’s turn to get behind the wheel of the new car for the first time to begin his two day programme.

Timo Glock: “Today I was able to spend more time in the car and complete more laps than yesterday, so we are making steady progress at this early stage with the new car. We tested the moveable rear wing for the first time and it will be interesting to use during the races this season. I leave Jerez with a good feeling and now I can’t wait to jump in the car again next week in Barcelona.”

John Booth: “Today we completed another 57 laps which provides us with more valuable information. It was very useful to run the car with the moveable wing operational for the first time. Timo has done a very good job in the car over the past two days and we are quickly understanding the MVR-02. We look forward to two more positive days of running and to feeding this information back into the development programme to ensure we maintain our current momentum.”

Adrian Sutil continued to put the miles on the new VJM04 at the Jerez de la Frontera circuit in southern Spain. On only its second day of testing Adrian put more than 300km with a best time of 1:21.780, the sixth quickest of the day.
With a good foundation set-up established yesterday, Adrian evaluated the different tyre compounds available this test before moving onto more performance work in the afternoon. The car ran reliably throughout the day, allowing the team to push on with its programme for the week.
Adrian will now hand over to Paul di Resta for his first-ever laps in the VJM04 tomorrow.

Adrian Sutil: Today was really the start of testing for us as yesterday was principally a shakedown to make sure the systems all worked correctly. It went well, with a lot of laps completed. The car has a good balance and I think for the first real day of running we did a reasonable lap time. We had a reoccurrence of yesterday’s problems with the floor and we know what the issue is, but to get a permanent fix we’ll have to go back to the factory. I’m already looking forward to seeing how it goes in Barcelona with the KERS and the moveable rear wing, which should both give some extra performance.

Dominic Harlow, circuit engineering director: A productive second day with the VJM04, with Adrian running all the available tyre compounds, carrying out some aerodynamic tests and just starting to look at setup of the car. There were no major reliability issues aside from a couple of sensors. That is encouraging, also good to see was a general improvement in laptime as we started to understand the car better despite the circuit probably dropping off a bit this afternoon. Paul will get his first opportunity to drive the car tomorrow and will pickup the programme where we left off this afternoon.

Jarno Trulli: "The morning went well for us. We managed to do a decent number of laps and put in a couple of quite long runs but then we had to stop with a mechanical issue which could not be fixed in time for me to go out again today. I would have liked to have had more running today but this is all part of testing a brand new car - we need to iron out the problems now so when the races start we have ironed out all the problems. Hopefully Heikki can put in some decent mileage over the next couple of days and really start to push the development of the car."

Dieter Grass, Sporting Director: "We had a promising start to the day. We found some interesting results from the setup work we did and have continued to learn more about the Pirelli tyres and how to maximise their grip levels on the car. Overnight we were able to fix the issues we had yesterday but unfortunately we had a mechnical problem at the front of the car that we were not able to fix in time today, but the spare parts we need are arriving from the factory tonight so we will be in good shape for Heikki to get into the car tomorrow."

Williams Cosworth

Sam Michael, Technical Director: Today started well, then late morning we had a warning message on the KERS battery. That required us to strip the battery to check if there was a problem or if we just had a sensor error - fortunately it was the latter. It cost us 3½ hours though. Despite that, we made some really useful progress understanding the car’s aero characteristics with the setup changes we ran in the morning. We started this afternoon with a long run but went off at T4, the high speed left hander.

Pastor Maldonado: Yesterday we were aero testing so weren’t focusing too much on out right lap times. This morning we covered good mileage testing different things on the car. After a bit of time in the garage so the team could check the KERS, I went back out later this afternoon. We were just starting a race simulation when a couple of laps in I lost the car at T4 which put me out for the rest of the day.

Williams will be back on track tomorrow, Saturday 12 February, with Rubens Barrichello driving for the third day of the test.

Lotus Renault GP

Vitaly Petrov remained in the R31 today as the team completed 65 laps in Jerez de la Frontera, Spain.

There don’t appear to be any problems with warm-up of the hard tyre compound, which the team ran for the first time today. Degradation levels looked reasonable. Optimisation of the KERS in conjunction with the braking system by completing some useful mapping work.

Vitaly Petrov: “We were not worried about the lap times and instead we focussed on the tyres to try and understand how they work. We also did some aero mapping in the morning and then spent a lot of time working on the brakes and the KERS. Unfortunately we lost some time with a water leak, which meant we could not do the race distance in the afternoon as we planned. After three days in the R31, I’m only just starting to feel really comfortable with the car and it was in the last two hours of the session that we found some good things with the set-up.”

Eric Boullier: “Our second day in Jerez was not the easiest because we suffered with some minor technical problems. However, we still managed reasonable mileage and we have ticked off some more items on the job list. In particular, the work we did on the brakes and the KERS has been very beneficial and we are learning how to get the most from the system. For tomorrow, Nick [Heidfeld] will get his opportunity in the car and this will give us the chance for a detailed evaluation before we make any decisions.”

Alan Permane: "We started the day with a continuation of our aero work in the morning and carried out some constant speed runs down the straight. The focus then switched to our tyre programme and working on the brakes and KERS. Unfortunately we were plagued by a water leak for much of the day, which limited our running and meant we did not have the chance to complete a race distance. The issue has now been resolved. For tomorrow, Nick Heidfeld will be in the car, while Bruno Senna will be given some mileage on Sunday."

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