Lotus hampered by gearbox problems

Lotus were off to a good start in the morning after running a series of laps on intermediates in the morning. After that though, problems with the gearbox hampered progress and prevented Heikki Kovalainen to do his planned race simulation.

Heikki Kovalainen:
"It was good to start the day with some runs on the intermediates in proper damp conditions. There wasn't a lot of standing water on the track but it was pretty damp all round - we needed to try out the inters in these conditions so we've now amassed some very useful data on those. After that we wanted to do a race distance but the gearbox problem meant we couldn't complete that part of the plan. Despite this I'm still finding that the car has good balance and is basically a decent package - we'll sort out the problems and tomorrow we'll try the race distance again and see where we are after that."

Mike Gascoyne, Chief technical officer:
"It was a reasonably productive day although we had to stop slightly earlier than planned due to a gearbox lubrication issue. This morning we were able to run on the inters on a damp track for the first time and we have obtained some useful data from those runs. We worked through the rest of the compound choices throughout the day on high fuel loads which is helping us learn more about how to maximise the performance of the Pirellis with the car."

Test laps: 54
Weather: Grey, cloudy / sunny
Min/Max track temp: 6˚/ 25˚
Fastest lap: 1.30.065 (lap 37)