Force India Barcelona test notes 2009-03-09

Sutil completes first day of Barcelona test

9 March 2009 - Adrian Sutil today kicked off the Force India Formula One Team's second official test of 2009. Today's programme, which took place at the Circuit de Catalunya, Spain, very much followed on from the VJM02's initial test last week in Jerez, with Adrian testing a range of set-ups, different tyre compounds and conducting both qualifying and race simulations.

Adrian completed more than 600km over the day, with a best time of 1min 22.452. He will remain in the car for a further day tomorrow before Giancarlo Fisichella takes over on Wednesday for the final two days.

Adrian Sutil

I feel quite confident and pleased with the progress we made today. 129 laps is a good achievement and we got a lot more data. We simulated a race and qualifying and actually it felt good. We did a long run, which was very important to see how the tyres react over this distance. I feel actually much more prepared for Melbourne, but let's see tomorrow if we can improve our times as the track conditions in the morning were not ideal.

James Key, technical director

Today we concentrated on simulating a race weekend, with qualifying runs and then a race simulation this afternoon. Unfortunately the qualifying sims were a bit of a compromise due to stoppages and we missed the windows with the tyres on both occasions, but overall the car performed well and was very reliable, completing 129 laps in total, obviously a very big improvement on last week and shows we have overcome the initial reliability issues. We learnt quite a lot about the tyre performance over the longer runs; we have a little more work to do on bringing the tyres in at the moment as they seem to be consistent on the longer outings but less so on the shorter runs. Otherwise it's been a very productive day with a few aero checks and set-up changes at the end.

Testing data
Driver: Adrian Sutil
Track: Circuit de Catalunya, Spain
Best lap time: 1min 22.452
Laps completed: 129
Kilometres completed: 600km
Air temperature: High of 17C
Track temperature: High of 24C
Weather: Some scattered clouds, sunny periods

-credit: force india