03/06/2005
NEWS STORY
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McLaren, and in particular Kimi Raikkonen, continued to set an electric pace at Silverstone today.
The Finn's fastest lap was over 1.5s quicker than anything anyone else could manage today, and 2.2s quicker than teammate Juan Pablo Montoya.
After the rain on Wednesday and (almost) ideal conditions on Thursday, the weather on the final day was mixed, with sunshine in the morning, and a couple of light showers and then a heavy downpour in the afternoon.
Raikkonen and Montoya continued with tyre testing for the British Grand Prix. However, Juan Pablo had an oil leak from the gearbox on his car at 10:20, which contaminated the clutch and lead to the gearbox being changed. After rain had set in at 15:20 testing had to be continued on wet weather tyres.
The Colombian was back on track before the lunch break. Kimi, meanwhile, had a productive day completing 82 laps.
"After having covered more than three Grands Prix distances with my engine yesterday and today, I am very happy with how the test went," said the Finn. "I am now looking forward to getting back on track in Montreal next Friday."
"We had a good session this week," added Montoya, "there were a couple of small issues as is always the case with testing, but the team resolved them quickly, and I was able to cover over 400 kms in total."
Second and third quickest were the Toyotas of Ralf Schumacher and Jarno Trulli. It's been a hectic week for the Japanese team which has also been testing at Monza, with Trulli commuting between the two circuits.
"Yeah, (I've been) pretty busy you might say! And it was busy in the car as well," said the Italian. "I did over 500kms on Wednesday at Monza, then flew to England and ran over 100 laps on the first day here because we had a big programme of performance tyre testing to work through for the British GP.
"The circuit conditions were not ideal on the first day because the surface was pretty 'green' and there wasn't much grip at first," he continued. "That complicates things a little when you are doing performance comparison tests.
"On Friday we concentrated on more tyre development, this time on longer runs and had some good results. I lost a bit of time in the morning with a precautionary engine change and then we had some typical British weather, which at least allowed us to do some running with intermediate tyres in the afternoon."
"As well as the tyre comparisons we also managed to do some damper evaluation as well before the rain came this afternoon," added Ralf.
Fourth quickest was Giancarlo Fisichella, who was partnered by World Championship leader Fernando Alonso.
The French team continued with a programme centred around further tyre testing and set-up development. Fernando lost track-time as a result of mechanical problems in the morning, nonetheless the team completed high mileage to get firm directions on tyre choice.
"We completed another solid day's running, although some problems meant we did not complete as many laps as we hoped to," admitted chief test engineer Christian Silk. "However, both drivers obtained good information on the tyres, and we continue the set-up work begun yesterday.
"Some rain showers passed through this afternoon, and we made the most of them to conduct some tyre development on wet and full wet compounds. In spite of not running on Wednesday, this has been a productive week and we are in good shape for the Grand Prix here in several weeks' time."
It was a difficult day for WilliamsF1, which saw its drivers - Mark Webber and Nico Rosberg - cause a number of 'red flags'. The German suffered a mechanical problem, while Webber spun off twice, once in the morning and once in the afternoon.
"Although the weather did not prove ideal for dry tyre work, we did go through all the soft and hard tyre programmes that Michelin presented," said Sam Michael. "We now have to go through all the data to make our tyre choice for the race here in a month's time.
"In addition to tyre work, we also worked on set-ups, tested a few different aero parts in readiness for the Canadian GP and signed off some new mechanical parts for the water system," he revealed.
"It was a very successful test for us," added Mario Theissen. "We concentrated on making improvements to the start procedure and we also made some progress in terms of traction control."
Red Bull had three drivers on duty, however under the terms of the agreement between the 'rebel' teams, only two drivers were used at any one time.
Having had his Wednesday test postponed, American Scott Speed finally took to the Northamptonshire track this afternoon, however conditions were not ideal.
Scottish veteran David Coulthard was the quickest of the trio, posting a best time of 1:19.926, 2.97s off Raikkonen's pace. It was revealed, following Speed's run in the afternoon that the American will drive the third car in Montreal and Indianapolis.
Ferrari's run of disappointing form appeared to continue, with Rubens Barrichello only kept off the bottom of the timesheets by Speed.
The Brazilian continued with work begun on Wednesday by Luca Badoer, aimed at finding the best set-up for the F2005.
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