A character building week - Wirth

The testing as Jerez was character building, Virgin Racing's technical director Nick Wirth has admitted. Their VR-01 suffered a few but significant problems, as first they lost a front wing and lost quite a bit of time on two days as parts weren't readily available. Then days later hydraulic problems made them lose a complete day of running as they frantically tried to resolve it.

"It has been a character-building week, that's for sure! Despite our best efforts to cure the hydraulic problem which has beset our entire test, this was simply not achievable with the components that we had available in the field," Wirth said of his teams first testing sessions.

"The specific problem is that we have been losing hydraulic oil at a rate which has limited the number of laps we can achieve on each run and so we look forward to receiving updated parts for the Barcelona test," he explained, "which we expect to fully resolve the problem."

"Having said that, we will now need to continue focusing on reliability work when we would have liked to introduce our Bahrain-specification aerodynamic updates. The revised programme means we will be reserving our full set of aero warpaint for the first race."

Virgin Racing will continue to test with the rest of the teams in Barcelona later this week, going from 25-28 February.