Satisfying day for Renault at Jerez

After a short but nice and well-deserved break this weekend, the Renault F1 Team is back on track in Jerez for its last testing session before the Christmas break. Giancarlo Fisichella and Heikki Kovalainen will be at the wheel of the R26 all week.

The testing programme was pretty similar to last week. The two cars are now using the new 2007 gear box and the two drivers continued their reliability programme related to this main part.

Furthermore, Heikki and Giancarlo carried a large tyre programme today in order to comprehend better how the Japanese envelops react. As they enjoyed a trouble-free day, they provided the engineers with a lot of data to analyse tonight.

At the end of the session, Heikki was still on top of the timing sheet in 1:19.466 and Giancarlo set the fifth-fastest laptime in 1:20.108 with 215 laps covered on both cars.

Christian Silk, the Test Team Chief Engineer, seemed pretty satisfied with this first day of testing: “It was a good first day of testing. We completed our programme on both cars and enjoyed a trouble-free day which is quite satisfying as we are running the two cars with the new gear box this week.”