Promising start for B.A.R Honda

Practice for the Chinese Grand Prix got underway at the Shanghai International Circuit today, with promising results for the B.A.R Honda team. In this morning’s first session Jenson Button was 10th fastest, with his team-mate Takuma Sato two places behind in 12th.

Lap times improved in the afternoon’s second one-hour session as more rubber was put down on the 5.4-km track. Jenson’s fastest lap in session two was one second faster than he had managed in the morning, making him seventh fastest overall, and Takuma was 1.5s faster than in the morning, making him 13th. McLaren’s Pedro de la Rosa was fastest in both sessions; his fastest time of 1:32.834s was 1.2s faster than last year’s pole position time.

B.A.R Honda now has until tomorrow morning to make its tyre choice for the remainder of the weekend, during which Jenson will continue to use the same Honda V10 that he raced to fifth place at Suzuka last weekend. Takuma, on the other hand, has a brand new V10 for this race, as per this year’s two-race engine regulations.

Jenson Button "We’ve completed all our planned running for today and achieved a lot of laps, so we’ve made a good start in that respect. We suffered from low grip this morning but the grip level improved in the afternoon. Overall the car feels better to drive than in the last two races. We have a lot of data from both cars to look at so, as usual, it’s a busy night ahead with the engineers to make sure we keep moving in the right direction.”

Takuma Sato “It was a good start to the practice session and this has given us a good initial direction. The balance at the beginning of the day was good and we acquired all the important information that we need to make our tyre decision for tomorrow. I’m looking forward to continuing this good progress throughout the rest of the weekend.”