Tag Archives: albert park

Australia Practice 1 – Robert Kubica takes the top spot for Renault

Robert Kubica has put himself and Renault at the top of the timesheets in the first practice session at the Albert Park circuit in Melborne. Rosberg, Button and Massa take the next three spots with Vettel taking the fifth place all with very similar times.
With the teams all using different fuel loads it’s hard to compare the times at the sharp end but further down the grid the Force India reserve driver Paul di Resta acquitted himself well finishing the session just a third of a second behind Liuzzi in his role as Friday tester for the team in place of Sutil.
The Sauber’s times mask a dreadful session for them where Kobayashi caused two red flag, de la Rosa’s car stopped out on track and the stewards want a word about one of the Kobayashi accidents, not the start to the weekend that they would have wanted given their poor [...]

Virgin hoping that they’ve finally solved their reliability issues

The Virgin team are confident that they have solved the reliability issues that meant that their car hasn’t run for more than 18 laps or so yet. This means that they have addressed the hydraulic problems that they have had since the launch of the car and the transmission problems that they had at Sakhir.
Virgin impressed at Bahrain by qualifying fastest of all the new teams and then disappointed on race day by not managing to make the first set of stops. The hydraulic issues that put out one of their cars out in Bahrain seems the same as the one that they claimed to have solved after the pre-season testing where they had these issues – it seems that the fix didn’t work and they now have a ‘robust’ solution to the problem, let’s hope that’s true.
They also had transmission issues in Bahrain and these would seem separate from [...]