Williams Jerez test notes day three

Rubens Barrichello took over the cockpit today for day three of this week's four day test session in Jerez. The forecast of 80% rain proved true to form as this morning's dry track made way for wet conditions from 11am. With the weather compromising running, the team were forced to adapt their programme of set-up work to the conditions, but still covered the highest mileage of the day with Rubens completing 120 laps of the 4.428km Spanish circuit.

Today's fastest times were inevitably all set in the morning, with Toro Rosso's Jamie Alguersuari setting the quickest time of 1:19.919. While on a race sim, Rubens recorded his quickest time of 1:23.217, which put him in 8th position.

Rubens will continue the team's set-up work tomorrow for the last day of the test.

Sam Michael, Technical Director:
We went straight into a race run on slick tyres in the morning as we knew we would only have a short window before the rain came. After that, it was a wet programme for the rest of the day. We spent the session working on control strategies, systems checks, race starts and a couple of small set-up changes. We had no mechanical problems.

Rubens Barrichello:
We basically only had a few laps in the dry this morning but then the rest of our running was done in the wet, so it was hard to find where the limit was and evaluate our performance. I'm looking forward to getting back in the car tomorrow and getting some more mileage in.

-source: williams