Zoom Saving mileage for better test conditions

Following two weeks of work in the heat of Bahrain, it was a return to winter testing in its truest form for the Toyota Racing team today. Barcelona's Circuit de Catalunya provided a cold, grey setting for the start of this week's running. There was light rain around the circuit at regular intervals throughout the day and temperatures only just made it into double figures.

The team was planning to carry out comparative work on the TF108's new aerodynamics package. The unsettled weather made that difficult but Jarno Trulli still put in 57 laps, delivering the sixth-fastest run of the group session with a time of 1:33.283.

Third team driver Kamui Kobayashi had a quieter day's work because limits to mileage and tyres meant there was little point in running in these conditions. With only a single installation lap to his name, his time was not taken into consideration.

Toyota will continue testing at the Circuit de Catalunya tomorrow with Jarno Trulli and Timo Glock driving.

Jarno Trulli:
"Today was wet so it wasn't an ideal day for testing. We were concentrating on testing some new parts for our new aerodynamics package. We made reasonable progress and collected some useful data but it's still too early to figure anything out yet. The track was changing throughout the day so direct comparisons were hard. In conditions like we had today we didn't do much mileage because we wanted to save some more miles and tyres for the next few days."

Kamui Kobayashi
"That was a short day's work for me. I put in an installation lap this morning and spent the rest of the day waiting for the weather to improve. We have limits on testing mileage so it was decided that we could not use up laps in conditions like these. That's the way testing goes sometimes but at least I have been able to recover fully after a long trip from Indonesia yesterday."

Dieter Gass, Chief Engineer Race and Test:
"The main aim of these two weeks of testing at Barcelona is to evaluate the aerodynamics package that we are scheduled to use in the first race. We have worked hard to get that ready early enough to try some set-up work and understand the new parts before we get to Melbourne. So it's frustrating that we have had to curtail our running today. The reliability of the TF108 so far means that we have already used up a lot of testing mileage so we will limit our running in the wet. Still, we would like to have completed more laps today but we didn't have enough tyres available. We expect tomorrow to be another wet day but Thursday could see some dry running."

D.B. © CAPSIS International
Source: Toyota