22/01/2008
NEWS STORY
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Ferrari headed the timesheets at Valencia today as eight more teams joined Renault and Williams to continue their preparations fro the new season, which gets underway in just over seven weeks.
In front of thousands of race fans, Kimi Raikkonen and Felipe Massa led the way as the Italian team worked on general development of the F2008 and on finding the best set-up for the cars. Neither driver encountered any technical problems, the duo completing 202 laps. Massa was the quicker of the two, out-pacing his World Championship winning teammate by 0.539.
24-hours after launching its 2008 contender, Nico Rosberg gave Williams a serious confidence boost by finishing third on the timesheets, ahead of the McLarens, Renaults and BMWs. Teammate Kazuki Nakajima, in the 2007 car, ended the day seventh, over 0.5s off his teammate's pace.
"After completing some further systems checks and mapping in the morning, Nico progressed onto long runs in the afternoon to check stabilised temperatures on the new cooling systems," said Sam Michael. "No major problems were encountered, so it was a successful initial run. Meanwhile, Kazuki continued the reliability programme with the FW29B."
Heikki Kovalainen was the quicker of the two McLaren drivers on duty, edging out Pedro de la Rosa by 0.137. The Woking duo spent the day accumulating more miles on the MP4-23 as work continued on the ongoing development of the 2008 challenger. There was particular focus on bringing the gearboxes up to mileage, to be in line with the new rules that gearboxes are to last for four races this season.
Fernando Alonso was again at the wheel of the new R28. The Spaniard and continued with set-up work in the morning, varying the balance of the car and evaluating the changes. He then concentrated on completing some long runs in the afternoon to test the reliability of different aspects of the car and to gather as much data as possible.
The French outfit enjoyed a productive day but this was slightly marred when Alonso ground to a halt just a few minutes before the end of the day. The Spaniard will be in the R28 again tomorrow for his last day of work this week. He will then hand over driving responsibilities to Nelson Piquet Jr, who will experience the R28 for the first time on Thursday.
"The second day ran smoothly and without any problems," said the Spaniard. "I was able to get on with my programme and had good discussions with my engineers at the end of the day. I completed some long runs this afternoon, and the car was reacting well, so the results are encouraging. We now need to keep moving forward and developing the car."
"We were able to achieve most of the objectives that we set ourselves for the second day of work," added Christian Silk. "When you start working with a new car, you have to make sure that all the systems on the car are reliable and functioning correctly. That is what we concentrated on today, and from that point of view everything went well. Tomorrow we will begin a programme which will be more interesting for the drivers and the engineers, which will allow us to gather more data."
Toro Rosso continues to impress, with Sebastian Vettel, in particular, looking good. The main item on the agenda for Vettel and Sebastien Vettel was getting to know the circuit, which the team has not used for some time. Once a decent set-up had been established, in the afternoon Bourdais worked on evaluating some new aero parts, while Vettel continued with set-up, as the track conditions gradually evolved because of changes in the wind and temperature.
BMW had Nick Heidfeld and Marko Asmer on duty, the Estonian out-pacing the German by 0.110. The German conducted development work with the F1.08 going through various aerodynamic comparisons - including what looked like antlers (see pictures) - and suspension settings. Although he encountered some minor technical problems, the team claims that it was a productive day.
Unlike last week, the weather conditions were very good and enabled the German outfit's engineers to gather valuable data. Asmer drove the F1.07B. He had a limited programme mainly concentrating on systems checking and development work with the SECU.
Tomorrow, Robert Kubica will drive the F1.08 while Nick Heidfeld will be at the wheel of the F1.07B.
After a successful first test in Jerez last week, Toyota has brought a second TF108 to Valencia where Jarno Trulli and Timo Glock were on duty today. The team encountered no major problems with either car, giving it the chance to change mechanical and aerodynamic settings, as well as looking at different suspension configurations.
"It was a tricky day, as usual here in Valencia," said Trulli. "It is always quite hard to reach a conclusion on a track where conditions change rapidly from run to run but it was important to get more data and more idea about the new car. I tried some set-up changes and development work testing aerodynamics. I am pretty happy with what we have achieved but we know there is still room for improvement so we will continue to work hard. We did quite a lot of laps today which was the plan and it was good to see the new car continues to be reliable."
"Today went okay," added Glock, "we continued where we left off in Jerez last week by getting more data about how the new car reacts to various set-up changes. I believe we have made a step forward with the TF108 compared to last year's car. We tried several different set-ups and we are pretty happy with the results, which show we are making progress. However, there is still plenty of work to do and we will push hard tomorrow and Thursday to get the most out of our time at Valencia."
"We had a productive day of testing and ran through a lot of different mechanical and aerodynamic set-up options," said Chief Engineer Race and Test, Dieter Gass, "while also looking at the suspension. The new car was again very reliable and this helped us to gain a lot of useful information which we will study to further improve performance. Even though the weather was mostly fine during the day, the wind picked up a bit in the afternoon which made the evaluation of our aero work a little tricky. As usual in testing, it is very difficult to assess comparative speed because we do not know what fuel levels the other teams were running but we are comfortable with our performance."
For Red Bull Racing, the agenda for the three day test is fairly straightforward: carrying on with the development of RB4, after its debut down the coast at Jerez de la Frontera last week. It was another positive day for the Austrian team, with 82 laps completed.
As usual with a new car, main items on the agenda included going through all the systems, getting to know the car generally and, because it ran pretty much trouble free, David Coulthard was also able to start looking at car balance and set-up work.
Mark Webber takes over behind the wheel tomorrow, which will be his first run in the new car.
Tonio Liuzzi was on duty for Force India, which concentrated on putting in some longer runs in preparation for the start of the season. The Silverstone-based outfit was able to complete one lengthy stint just before the lunchtime break. However, the day's running was limited by some minor mechanical problems in the afternoon and the Italian was only able to complete 64 laps over the course of the day.
"Unfortunately it was another difficult day for me," said the Italian, "as we had a few problems that kept us in the garage. In the morning we tried to improve the car balance as we don't come to Valencia very often and it's very different to Jerez. This took some time but we did get in some longer runs. We then had some problems and had to stop for a while so I couldn't finish the programme, but we did get some good consistency over the longer runs and made some changes that made the times faster."
"It was a reasonable first day today," added Mike Gascoyne, "though a couple of minor fuel related problems limiting running after lunch. We were at least able to make a start on our programme though, which we will continue with Adrian tomorrow."
Having missed last week's test at Jerez, Alex Wurz kicked off Honda's first test of 2008, the Austrian driving the RA107 as he began his acclimatisation to the team's procedures. The former Williams driver completed 51 laps finishing sixteenth, 3.2s off Massa's pace.
Rubens Barrichello will take over the test programme tomorrow morning, while Takashi Kogure will also be in action having been rewarded with a drive in the Honda RA107 as part of the Formula Dream Project in Japan.
To check out our Valencia Test gallery, containing over 50 pictures, click here