Renault testing at Silverstone, day 2

Renault completed their second day of testing in Silverstone with two drivers atop the timesheets. The Renault F1 Team continued its Silverstone testing programme today with Heikki Kovalainen and Nelson Piquet Jr at the wheel of the R26. Once more Piquet's performances were encouraging as he put in the fastest time of the day at only his second day of testing with this year's Renault.

Heikki continued the team’s preparations for the forthcoming Japanese Grand Prix, working on tyre selection for the Suzuka race with a mixture of longer and shorter runs. With a comparable track surface and similar demands for the tyres, Silverstone is the perfect venue for this work, and the Finn completed an intensive programme of 119 laps to finish the day second-fastest in a time of 1:19.700.

Nelsinho Piquet’s second day with the Renault F1 Team continued in the same encouraging fashion as yesterday’s debut. After completing endurance work in the morning, the young Brazilian focused on some tyre development and a set-up programme in the afternoon as he began learning about the R26 and fine-tuning it to suit his style. His encouraging performance was capped off with fastest time of the day in 1:19.565, having completed 73 laps.

The team’s Chief Test Engineer Christian Silk commented: “The team had another good day of testing, completing nearly 200 laps of a demanding circuit such as Silverstone, in spite of some delays this morning. Heikki continued working on the Suzuka tyres with Michelin, and the results are very encouraging. As for Nelson, he did some endurance running this morning before running a tyre and set-up programme in the afternoon, which allowed him to tune the car and start giving us some feedback. His performance was encouraging and, all in all, it has been a positive day for the team.”