Force India makes strong progress with VJM01

The Force India Formula One Team continued to make strong progress with its two new VJM01 cars on the second day of this week's three-day test at the Circuit de Catalunya, Spain. Giancarlo Fisichella and Tonio Liuzzi once more recorded some competitive lap times, with Giancarlo securing the sixth quickest time of the day - just 0.03secs behind the fifth-placed Ferrari of Felipe Massa and less than 1.5secs from the fastest time of the day - with Tonio posting the 10th best time.

The Italian duo both had encouraging days, completing set-up work in the morning and race and qualifying simulations in the afternoon. Both programmes went without major problems, with Giancarlo completing 102 laps and Tonio 89.

Adrian Sutil will take over from Tonio for the final day of testing, while Giancarlo remains for his second day.

Mike Gascoyne, chief technical officer: "Again a very productive day of testing. We had no major reliability issues and despite the numerous red flags, we were able to work through the whole programme, with both drivers doing set up work in the morning and then race distances in the afternoon with pit stop practice. That went very well on both cars, so it was overall a good day. Thanks very much to Tonio for his two days of testing, we have definitely made progress with the new package and are very pleased so far."

Giancarlo Fisichella: "It was a good day. We did over 100 laps and worked through all the schedule. I was struggling with the front locking at first, but then we understood what the problem was and made a change so the car was back to normal and at the end I was comfortable and confident and able to improve my lap times. I am happy with the new package, it is better with more downforce and has more stability, but we have still got something more for the first race so it looks quite encouraging."

Tonio Liuzzi "Today was a much better test and we achieved a lot of kilometres and had no issues with the car. It seems to be getting better and better as we felt yesterday. We seem to have made a step forward from last year's car and now we are tuning the little details. We did some long runs and short runs for both qualifying and race simulations and were pretty happy. We still have some work to do, but we are for sure going in a good direction. The engineers did a great job - it was a tough programme between myself and Giancarlo but we both had no issues reliability wise and were very competitive over the day."

Testing data
Driver: Giancarlo Fisichella & Tonio Liuzzi
Track: Circuit de Catalunya, Spain
Best lap time: 1min 22.516 (Giancarlo) / 1min 22.942 (Tonio)
Laps completed: 191 (102 Giancarlo, 89 Tonio)
Kilometres completed 889km