Nico Rosberg continues Mercedes domination of the timesheets at Jerez on penultimate day of testing, but Romain Grosjean and Sebastian Vettel are quickest 2012 runners.

Driving the 2011 car, Rosberg completed a programme aimed at furthering the team's understanding of the 2012 Pirelli tyres, similar to Schumacher yesterday. He completed 118 laps which also allowed the team to put more mileage on 2012 development items on the car.

This was the final day for the German outfit at Jerez, its 2012 contender, the F1 W03, currently scheduled to make its test debut on 21 February at Barcelona.

"I'm happy with the testing that we have achieved here in Jerez," said Rosberg, "we learned a lot about the Pirelli tyres and a few other things for the new car. It seems that the tyres are closer performance-wise this year, with the rear tyres also looking a bit stronger. Pirelli have done a good job so far. You can't really compare the lap times with other teams, but it was interesting to learn a lot with our 2011 car. Now I'm really looking forward to the two Barcelona tests with our new Silver Arrow."

"We have had a productive and busy three days in Jerez this week running the MGP W02 car for the final time," added Ross Brawn. "Simultaneously the final preparations have been taking place back at the factory for the first test with our 2012 car in Barcelona. Michael and Nico have been able to complete some valuable mileage this week, and enhanced our understanding of the new season's Pirelli tyres which will prove very useful once the new car in is on track."

2011 GP2 Series champion Romain Grosjean made his debut in the Lotus E20, the young Frenchman completing 117 laps on his way to posting a 1:18.419, 0.806s shy of Rosberg's pace but 0.878s quicker than the next quickest man in a 2012 car, reigning world champion Sebastian Vettel.

As he focussed on system checks, temperature monitoring, data correlation and evaluation of the performance of the car with its initial aerodynamic package, on his final lap the Frenchman deliberately ran out of fuel in order to test fuel pickup.

"I am one of the happiest guys in the world right now," he said. "It's been a really good day for me. We were fastest in the morning then we completed some longer runs in the afternoon. It's great to finally drive the car which I have seen coming together and being built at Enstone. Working so well with all the mechanics and the engineers made it such a memorable first day in the E20. The car feels good on different fuel loads and tyre compounds we used. For sure there's margin for improvement in the tests ahead, but it's a great start to the year."

"Another strong day with 117 laps and over 500 km completed," added Alan Perman. "We ran a similar programme to the one we ran during the previous two days with Kimi. This gives us good data across a range of scenarios and valid comparisons between our drivers. Track conditions were better today, with more rubber down and less wind than yesterday. We conducted set-up work on the medium compound tyre in the morning. Some of these were set-ups we ran with Kimi, others were new. In the afternoon we focused on getting as many laps completed as possible to test the reliability of the E20, which proved to be faultless."

After 96 laps, Vettel, enjoying his first experience of the car with which he hopes to win a third successive title, admitted it was a pleasure to get behind the wheel of an F1 car again after the winter break.

"It's been two months since we were in the car, so it does take a couple of laps to get back in the rhythm," said the German, "but the car feels fine and as we expected. There's quite a loss of grip due to the regulation changes, but you get used to it quickly and then start to explore how the new car feels. So far we can be happy, we had a couple of issues, but it's normal when the car is new."

"Sebastian's first day in the car went almost perfectly," added Ian Morgan, the Austrian outfit's head of race engineering. "It was very cold this morning and hard to get temperature into the tyres. That meant that the first couple of hours weren't too productive, but later on the conditions were great with less wind than yesterday, so we managed to get through almost everything we wanted, including two long runs, which went well. We would have done a third, but there were a couple of red flags at the end of the session so we missed a few laps. But we can't complain, as it's gone well.

"Tomorrow's programme will be more of the same," he continued. "We're on course to tick off all the things we wanted to get done and we hope we can complete the list tomorrow."

Lewis Hamilton was in action for McLaren, the Englishman completing 80 laps on his way to posting the fourth best time of the day. As with teammate Jenson Button, the first day was about acclimatising Hamilton to the new car, finding a workable set-up direction and ironing out a few minor issues following his initial feedback.