19/02/2008
NEWS STORY
 |
Unseasonable weather badly disrupted today's programme at Barcelona, leaving some teams to abandon their original schedule and others to simply watch from the sidelines. There was light rain around the circuit at regular intervals throughout the day and temperatures only just made it into double figures.
Strict security, together with the poor weather, left the grandstands almost empty, despite the fact that local hero Fernando Alonso was on duty. Meanwhile, even the media found itself restricted, with parts of the track, including the roof of the pit complex, declared off-limits.
Topping the timesheets at the end of the day was the Williams duo of Nico Rosberg and Kazuki Nakajima, as the Grove outfit debuted another of its special liveries in celebration of the forthcoming milestone season.
This week's livery, the fifth in a series of six, carried the handwritten best wishes of the team's seven World Champion drivers. Alan Jones, Keke Rosberg, Nelson Piquet, Nigel Mansell, Alain Prost, Damon Hill and Jacques Villeneuve, all of whom sent the team personal congratulations as it embarks on its fourth decade of Formula One and at the Italian Grand Prix later this year, will record its 500th Grand Prix start.
Between them, Rosberg and Nakajima completed 169, almost 40 more than the other six drivers who ventured out today.
"The weather really hampered play today," said Williams Test Team Manager, Dickie Stanford. "The intermittent rain, in particular, made the track very greasy for the duration of the session. Nico and Kazuki both concentrated on set-up work and endurance runs so our running wasn't as adversely affected by the conditions as it perhaps was for others."
Red Bull had David Coulthard and Mark Webber on duty, though between them they only completed 50 laps. The Milton Keynes duo made the best of the conditions, carrying out some practice starts, but the team chose not to do too many laps, hoping for better conditions tomorrow.
There was one piece of unscheduled excitement when Coulthard "had a moment" on the uphill section between Turns 7 and 8, which ended up with him kissing the wall, but the minor damage was soon repaired and he was back out on track.
Like its rivals, Renault was forced to revise its programme and was unable to continue with its set-up programme as planned. Fernando Alonso and Nelson Piquet were on duty, but both were restricted to limited running by the poor conditions.
Both men took the opportunity to complete laps in the rain to gather data for wet running and to assess the balance of the car on a damp track. The team also checked all the systems on the car and now turns its thoughts to the rest of the week.
"It was cold and wet today," said Alonso, "and so there was no point in doing a lot of running. It was an opportunity to try the car in the wet, but it was so slippery that we did not do many laps. We waited in the afternoon for conditions to improve, but they did not so we ended the day slightly early."
"The weather was the main problem today," added Piquet, "limiting what we could do in terms of our programme. I only managed a handful of laps, but there was not much we could learn, so we will have to hope that the weather improves later in the week."
"It was a day disrupted by the weather and so we did not learn much at all really," admitted Christian silk. "When you have days like this you just have to adapt the programme as best you can, and so we made the most of the rain by completing some wet weather running just to check the balance of the cars and to carry out basic system checks."
Following two weeks of work in the heat of Bahrain, it was a return to winter testing in its truest form for the Toyota. The team was planning to carry out comparative work on the TF108's new aerodynamics package. Despite the unsettled weather however, Jarno Trulli put in 57 laps, while third driver Kamui Kobayashi had a quieter day's work because limits to mileage and tyres meant there was little point in running in these conditions.
"Today was wet so it wasn't an ideal day for testing," admitted Trulli. "We were concentrating on testing some new parts for our new aerodynamics package. We made reasonable progress and collected some useful data but it's still too early to figure anything out yet. The track was changing throughout the day so direct comparisons were hard. In conditions like we had today we didn't do much mileage because we wanted to save some more miles and tyres for the next few days."
"That was a short day's work for me," said Kobayashi. "I put in an installation lap this morning and spent the rest of the day waiting for the weather to improve. We have limits on testing mileage so it was decided that we could not use up laps in conditions like these. That's the way testing goes sometimes but at least I have been able to recover fully after a long trip from Indonesia yesterday."
"The main aim of these two weeks of testing at Barcelona is to evaluate the aerodynamics package that we are scheduled to use in the first race," said the Japanese outfit's Chief Race and Test Engineer, Dieter Gass. "We have worked hard to get that ready early enough to try some set-up work and understand the new parts before we get to Melbourne. So it's frustrating that we have had to curtail our running today. The reliability of the TF108 so far means that we have already used up a lot of testing mileage so we will limit our running in the wet. Still, we would like to have completed more laps today but we didn't have enough tyres available. We expect tomorrow to be another wet day but Thursday could see some dry running."
As previously reported, McLaren was present but opted not to run. The team will wait to see how conditions develop overnight before deciding whether to participate tomorrow, when Ferrari is scheduled to begin its programme.
To check out our Barcelona test gallery, click here