Force India Jerez test notes 2009-12-02

Force India young driver test continues 2 December 2009 - Paul di Resta and JR Hildebrand continued their progress in the Force India Formula One Team's young driver test at Jerez circuit, southern Spain. Paul was in the car first this morning and ...

Force India young driver test continues

2 December 2009 - Paul di Resta and JR Hildebrand continued their progress in the Force India Formula One Team's young driver test at Jerez circuit, southern Spain. Paul was in the car first this morning and after completing installation runs and some initial set up work, went on to run some 2010 development items and conduct some fuel system evaluation. The 23-year-old posted the second quickest time of the morning, 1:19.411, and 58 laps.

JR took over for the afternoon session and conducted a similar programme of basic set up and evaluation of the VJM02 with a simulated 2010 fuel tank load. With colder conditions and light rain in the early part of the afternoon the 21-year-old American Indy Lights champion completed 49 laps with a best of 1:20.517.

JR will continue tomorrow morning, with Paul taking over in the afternoon.

Paul di Resta
Yesterday the programme was to get comfortable in the car and to see how everything worked. I was able to get to a reasonable level quite quickly after one run so I felt prepared and had progressed enough for the team to be able to use me to test some development items, which will of course help them in 2010. We had quite a structured programme this morning of running back to back set-up for 2009 and 2010 and both long and short runs, but it went pretty well. I'm up to speed now and I understand what I can do to improve my own performance. Equally each run we are doing something different so I need to keep learning and giving feedback so the team can get the information they need too. I hope they feel they can use me now.

JR Hildebrand
When we first started running we were testing different brake settings, which really didn't work very well for me. The first couple of runs were really spent working on that and then getting to grips with the track again, particularly as the grip had improved. Coming into this test I was concerned I wouldn't be able to maximise the high speed cornering of the car, but I was able to get the most out of the two high speed sections of the track so I was really happy with this progress. On the run I got the best time we were running on a particularly conservative engine setting so I was pretty satisfied, even if the lap time didn't really show on the timesheets. In terms of my comfort and confidence however both were way up today and I am actually really happy with how today went.

Dominic Harlow, chief race engineer
We completed more than 100 laps between Paul and JR today to build on yesterday's positive start. We concentrated on looking more at the effects of 2010 regulation changes during today's test and that has produced some interesting results for us. A good effort from the team and the drivers today in executing the programme and we look forward to continuing the test tomorrow.

Testing data
Driver: Paul di Resta (am) / JR Hildebrand (pm)
Track: Circuito de Jerez, Spain
Best lap time: Paul: 1min 19.411 / JR: 1min 20.517
Laps completed: Total 107 (Paul 58 / JR 49)
Kilometres completed: 465km (Paul 252km / JR 213km)
Air temperature: High of 18C
Track temperature: High of 22C
Weather: Overcast in the morning, light rain over lunch and early afternoon