Very productive day for Renault as Piquet puts down 193 laps

The ING Renault F1 Team remained in the south of France today to complete a second day of testing at the Paul Ricard circuit in Le Castelet, close to Marseille. Again the team enjoyed warm and sunny conditions for most of the day, allowing the continuation of its preparations for next week’s Monaco Grand Prix.

Nelson Piquet took over driving duties from Lucas Di Grassi and completed another busy day in the R28, clocking up 193 laps by the close of play. The team initially began working on an aero programme in the morning, before switching to R&D work in the afternoon.

Nelson remains in the car for the final day of running tomorrow, when the team’s focus will switch to next month’s Canadian Grand Prix. The configuration of the track will therefore be altered to allow the team to run with a low downforce set-up.

Nelson Piquet: “We got through quite a lot today and fortunately it stayed dry for most of the day, which meant I was able to complete a lot of laps. But it’s difficult so simulate the conditions we will have in Monaco next week, and so we mainly concentrated on putting miles on the car and evaluating a couple of new developments that we have, as opposed to set-up work.”

Christian Silk, Chief Test Engineer: “As the high mileage shows we had good reliability today and we completed our programme as planned. This morning was spent getting Nelson used to the circuit as well as doing aero development on the car, which went well. Then, in the afternoon we did some work on R&D. Everything worked very nicely and so overall a good day’s running for us.”

Nelson Piquet R28-04, 193 laps, 676km, fastest lap 1:06.355