Testing ends with more bad weather

The week's testing came to a close on January 26th with more bad weather on the final day. In fact, the conditions were so wet at Valencia that McLaren abandoned its programme without Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton putting in any track time. The team is scheduled return to the circuit next week with Hamilton and tester Pedro de la Rosa.

Felipe Massa.

Photo by xpb.cc.

It was also wet at Vallelunga in the morning, where Ferrari's Felipe Massa re-arranged the front aero of the F2007 when he went off track after just a few laps. The Brazilian was unharmed but the car needed some repairs before he could get back to work. Teammate Kimi Raikkonen initially only did one installation lap in the 248 F1.

The rain cleared in the afternoon and Massa returned to the track to continue with development of the new car but this time a technical issue cut short his day. Raikkonen carried on with his familiarization process and was the quicker of the two overall, 1:19.758. Massa only managed nine laps and was two and a half seconds down.

"We are at least at the same level as last year's car, but perhaps we've already improved on that," Massa said about the new car, according to Gazzetta dello Sport. "We don't yet have all the developments the car will have at the first race and these new elements will let us improve a lot. But in my opinion we are already a step ahead, especially in the stability."

Meanwhile, Honda completed its first test of the RA107 at Barcelona. Rubens Barrichello drove the new car for the first two days and Button took over on Friday. The usual system checks and control runs were their focus, while Button and tester Christian Klien also shared last year's RA106 over the three days for electronics and tyre work.

"It's been a very productive day which was really about running through all the simple things with the car such as basic set-up changes and getting the balance to my liking," Button said about his first taste of the RA107. "We achieved that pretty early on which is positive and it enabled us to cover a good number of laps."

Engineering director Jacky Eeckelaert concluded: "The aero data collected from the RA107 this week shows a very good correlation with the model data from the wind tunnel so we are pleased with that. Now that the car has gone through all of its reliability checks, we will start work on set-up evaluation in Valencia next week."