Renault Jerez test notes 2006-12-08

The third and final day in Jerez for the world champion Renault F1 Team.

The French team this evening concluded the second of its three pre-Christmas test sessions after a busy day on track in Jerez.

Early this morning, the team had been hoping for a relatively straightforward programme, running its pair of 2007 race drivers to allow them to acclimatise to Bridgestone's wet tyres in the slippery, wet conditions that greeted the teams this morning in southern Spain.

However, as conditions continued to improve throughout the day, the drivers were able to begin running dry tyres before midday, meaning that both Renault drivers got a first taste of the new tyres in tricky damp conditions, and were still able to make good progress with their technical programmes once the circuit had dried.

Giancarlo Fisichella's target was once again to run the maximum number of miles possible, but today his goal was to put miles on the new 2007 gearbox for reliability reasons. This afternoon, once the track was completely dry, he was able to work on car set-up, a programme he completed without incident. He finished the day 7th fastest, after 89 laps.

Just like his team-mate, Heikki Kovalainen made the most of the morning's wet weather to discover the new wet tyres. He collected useful data before continuing a programme of set-up validation. He suffered a mechanical failure early in the afternoon, but still managed to complete his programme and finish the day in 6th position, after setting a best time of 1:20.372 and completing 70 laps.

Giancarlo Fisichella:

"I am pleased with how this first session went. It was important to do lots of laps in order to learn about our new Bridgestone tyres. I learned a lot, and I feel that I made some good progress this week in Jerez. We will continue to improve next week, so I am feeling pretty optimistic."

Heikki Kovalainen:

"It was a difficult but interesting session this week, because we ran in every kind of conditions. There was a lot of data collected and once we have analysed it, we will be able to make even more progress next week. We worked very hard, and we know where we are with the programme; I am feeling confident, and happy with what we have done this week."

Christian Silk, Chief Test Engineer:

"This was a good final day's running for us, which was unexpected given the conditions this morning. But we ended up making good progress, the new gearbox ran well, and we found some more interesting set-up ideas that we can investigate more fully next week in our final test before Christmas. We will be working hard until the end of the final day's running."

The Renault F1 Team will be back on track next week from 13 to 15 December, for the final test of 2006.

-credit: renault