Fairly productive day for Force India
Adrian Sutil continued the Force India Formula One Team's test today at the Circuit de Catalunya, Barcelona. The VJM02 again ran reliably over the day to complete 82 laps of the Spanish track with a best time of 1min 21.834, bringing Adrian's total mileage in the car this week to just under 1,000km.
Today's programme included a number of set-up changes, new aero tweaks and tyre comparisons. Numerous red flags in the morning delayed the schedule slightly, but the team was able to push on with the majority of its work this afternoon and made in-roads into its pre-season planned programme.
Giancarlo Fisichella will take over driving duties tomorrow and conclude the test on Thursday.
Adrian Sutil: "We could do a lot of running again today, which was the main aim of the programme. I feel a lot more confident in the car now we have got some reliability and can start to look at different set-ups and making the tyres work. We know we have a lot of work to do, particularly with the tyres as we still struggle to bring them in, but we now have a good idea of how the car is behaving. I'm looking forward to Melbourne now."
James Key, technical director: "Today was a fairly productive day with no major dramas. The car was very reliable yet again, allowing us to run through a number of set up changes. We are better understanding the way the car and tyres react to mechanical changes, which we can carry through to the rest of the test and onto Melbourne. We also tested a few new aero components, such as different engine covers, which behaved as expected so we have a direction. We are now in a pretty good state after a week's running and look forward to completing our programme with Giancarlo over the next two days."
