Force India's Nico Hulkenberg, topped the timesheets at Barcelona today ahead of Sergio Perez, Sebastian Vettel and Fernando Alonso, the four covered by just 0.572s.

"Nico's second day in the car saw a continuation of the programme we started yesterday," said chief engineer, Jakob Andreasen, "with aero runs, balance and set-up work, and a full day of tyre comparisons. "We got through all the items on the job list and once again the car has run faultlessly, which is a credit to the design team at Silverstone.

"Nico's feedback on the handling of the car continues to be positive and we now have a good feel for the set-up directions we need to take to extract even more performance."

"We started the day with some aero work," added Hulkenberg, "trying some constant speed runs and collecting more data. Then, the rest of the day was spent working on the balance of the car and trying out all four tyre compounds. I did some short runs, long runs and just got a feel for the tyre characteristics and how the car reacts to them. Once again the car has been very drivable all day and our baseline set-up has proved to be a good starting point for running all the different compounds."

Following yesterday's frustration, when the team was hampered by technical issues, Sauber and Sergio Perez had a much better day. The Mexican completed his planned programme, which included a full tyre comparison of all compounds, as well as aero and set up work.

"Today was a lot better," said Perez, "even though in the end we lost a bit of track time because of the exhaust problem. I am happy with how things went, we have gathered plenty of information to go through now and I believe we are working in the right direction. I hope we get some more work done with Kamui driving the next two days, and then we will be well prepared for next week's final pre-season test session."

"This was a far more positive day," added Giampaolo Dall'Ara, the Swiss outfit's head of track engineering. "Despite an exhaust problem in the late afternoon, we went through a good programme. Quite a few high priority points have been ticked off the job list. In the morning we started with aero comparisons, and then did some proper mechanical set up work. We also carried out a full comparison of all tyre compounds - super soft, soft, medium and hard - and ran different fuel loads. Of course it is not possible to really judge the car's performance yet as we don't know the other teams' programmes, but today was productive and now we can work out the programme for tomorrow when Kamui takes over."

After spending yesterday on development, Sebastian Vettel and a full race team put the RB8 through the rigours of a full race simulation today. In total the German completed 104 laps on his way to posting the third best time of the day.

"I'm happy that we got a lot of laps done," said the world champion. "Unfortunately, we had a little bit of a problem, it was small, but with testing you stop whenever there's a issue, take a look and see what's what and that always takes up a bit of time. But nevertheless, in the afternoon I was quite happy. We got a lot of laps done, more than 100, so we got through most of the programme.

"I think we are on the right road with the car," he continued. "The first impressions at the last test were fine. The car reacted the way we expected. I keep talking about the loss of downforce compared to last year, as we don't have the tools we had, but this is the same for everyone, not just us. So, we'll get on top of it and we'll spend the coming days trying to make improvements, find more performance and make the car faster. But so far, so good."

"It was again so cold this morning that we had problems with pit stop practice," revealed Ian Morgan, the team's head of race engineering, "simply because the equipment was freezing up as we tried to use it. After that we ran a bit of a free practice simulation, but we discovered a small problem, which lost us some time. It was only a minor issue and didn't require major work, but it meant that we had to run a compressed Quali simulation before lunch. Afterwards we got through a whole race distance, which, at the car's first go, is always very encouraging.

"Mark is in the car tomorrow for his race simulation, so we hope we can get through the full programme with him with no dramas," he added.

At Ferrari, Fernando Alonso continued with development and data acquisition relating to the behaviour of the F2012. The Spanish driver got through all the key elements of the planned programme, completing a total of 87 laps. His best time was a 1:23.180.