Virgin Racing's misery continued today with Lucas di Grassi forced to spend much of the session watching from the sidelines.

When the Brazilian was finally able to take to the track in the closing stages of the session, the conditions made it impossible to post anything like a sensible time.

"Once again, despite working round-the-clock to remedy yesterday's problem, we not only missed the opportunity for dry running early this morning, but it was so wet this afternoon that we and all the other teams lost a lot of running later in the session when we were finally able to get going," said Nick Wirth.

"This was particularly annoying given the great efforts by Wirth Research who, rather than just dispatching existing parts from our Bicester base, designed and manufactured new parts, R&D tested them and got them out to the circuit within a 24 hour period. Nevertheless, as was the case with the early issues we encountered with last year's Championship-winning LMP1 Acura, the harder you work, the luckier you get and with the hours we are putting in at the moment we are all hoping that our fortunes will change soon!

"The drivers remain positive, the data we are gathering is as expected and we're all keeping our heads down and just getting on with what we need to do at this early stage in our development."