Times and more from Jerez
Today’s action on track was in better conditions than yesterday but it was still damp at the Spainish circuit. Out of the four things that we wanted to see we got two of them Kobayashi took the Sauber all the way to the top and Button put the McLaren ahead of the Mercedes, Red Bull however didn’t manage to drag themselves off the bottom of the established teams and though Virgin did close the gap it’s still quite some difference.
A lot of the teams seem to be testing long runs with the high fuel loads that they are going to need to run, it’ll now only be the later stages of the race that they will have light fuel loads on board for so heavier cars are going to be the norm and the teams need to make sure that they can run heavy – and fast.
Tyre evaluation will also be an important part of this test to find out the wear rates and what types of performance they can get out of the various compounds with varying fuel loads on board.
Keeping the pieces on the car is a basic task that Virgin seem to have failed at and it’s cost them a lot of running today, just managing to complete a small number of laps is probably why they are still so far adrift but with the parts expected overnight hopefully we’ll see the car in action tomorrow.
The times in full:
1. Kamui Kobayashi, BMW Sauber, 1:19.950, 103 Laps
2. Sebastien Buemi, Toro Rosso, 1:20.026, 121 Laps
3. Jenson Button, McLaren, 1:20.618, 83 Laps
4. Nico Hulkenberg, Williams, 1:20.629, 67 Laps
5. Vitantonio Liuzzi, Force India, 1:20.754, 80 Laps
6. Michael Schumacher, Mercedes GP, 1:21.083, 124 Laps
7. Fernando Alonso, Ferrari, 1:21.424, 129 Laps
8. Robert Kubica, Renault, 1:22.003, 103 Laps
9. Mark Webber, Red Bull, 1:22.043, 99 Laps
10. Timo Glock, Virgin, 1:29.964, 11 Laps
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