The F1 newswire – Wednesday 8 February

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Wednesday, 08 February 2012 19:00

All the news the teams see fit to print, in one handy digest produced every 24 hours.

With the second day of winter testing in Jerez now done and dusted, there's still not much more to learn about the cars except their relative reliability.

For the second day running, MERCEDES have elected not to publish any quotes from team personnel, leaving it up to the driver to review the day. "We made the most of a reliable car today to do lots of laps and learn a lot about the new Pirelli tyres, and how they perform on longer and shorter runs, and with different set-up configurations," Michael Schumacher said. "It was a good and productive test, full of lots of useful information for the season ahead, and I am now looking forward to driving our 2012 car for the first time at the next test."

RED BULL had their first full day of running today. "After yesterday’s brief delay we had a pretty full programme to get through today and I’m pleased to say we got through the majority of it," said head of race engineering Ian Morgan. "There were a couple of minor niggles, but nothing major, so we didn’t really lose any time. Mark did some work evaluating the available Pirelli tyre compounds. Sebastian is in the car tomorrow and we have a large programme to get through with him. We will get Seb settled and up to speed and then work through some more aero and tyre evaluation. So, there’s another busy day ahead."

Another team to leave the talking to the man behind the wheel was TORO ROSSO. "I am happy with what we did today: one hundred laps is around twice the distance we did yesterday," Daniel Ricciardo said. "So we achieved our aim of getting plenty of miles for me and the car with a mix of short and long runs, trying three different tyre compounds. I also did some practice starts and pit entry tests, just about as much as one can do in one day. We have made progress and were even able to do some back to back runs to start finding out how the car reacts to set-up changes."

It was a day of two drivers for FORCE INDIA, who gave reserve pilot Jules Bianchi an outing in the VJM05. "This morning was our first chance to work with Jules, so we focussed on getting him comfortable and familiar with all the systems on the car," said technical director Andrew Green. "He acclimatised quickly and soon found his rhythm, which meant we could push ahead with the aero work we had planned for this morning. He did an excellent job, worked well with the engineers and has settled into the team. In the afternoon session, Paul evaluated some set-up options while running with different tyre compounds: soft, medium and hard. The windy track conditions made that quite challenging, but we made the best of it and managed to get an early indication of where we should focus our efforts to extract performance from the car."

Despite a bit of early morning drama for LOTUS, it was a positive day for the team overall. "We had an interruption this morning with a slight off from Kimi which caused some damage to the car," said trackside operations director Alan Permane. "This gave us an opportunity with the car in the garage to change the specification of steering rack, so we lost a reasonable amount of time in the morning. The E20 ran reliably for the rest of the day, meaning we were able to complete most of our planned programme. We looked at set-up, using the medium and soft tyres. We ran long runs in the afternoon, including a final run on the hard tyre, to gain mileage and everything worked very well. The balance is good which is encouraging from a performance perspective and the E20 was reliable again. All specifications of tyres are behaving as we would expect with the E20 so this is another area of encouragement."

As was the case yesterday, FERRARI elected not to release any quotes, choosing instead to supply brief notes on their programme. "Second day of testing for Scuderia Ferrari at the Jerez de la Frontera circuit in southern Spain," the release read. "Following on from yesterday, it was again Felipe Massa who was at the wheel of the F2012, as he continued working on data acquisition relating to car behaviour. Felipe completed a total of 95 laps, the fastest in a time of 1.20.454. Testing at this track continues tomorrow, when Fernando Alonso will be at the wheel of the new car."

Team manager David Redding did the press release duties for MCLAREN this afternoon, saying: "Despite the cold and windy conditions, Jenson was able to log further mileage with MP4-27 today. It’s still early days, and this was very much an exploratory day, but we were able to get a useful understanding of how the car behaves and reacts out on the track. It’s satisfying that Jenson’s been able to complete more than 600km of trouble-free running over the past two days; that puts us in a good position for the rest of the week."

Over at SAUBER, head of track engineering Giampaolo Dall’Ara spoke for the team. "It was Sergio’s first day of testing with the new car," he said. "To start with he had to familiarise himself with the C31 and he did a bit of set-up work in the morning. During the lunch break we implemented new aero parts on the car. They are working well and as expected which is important and good news. In the afternoon we unfortunately lost track time because of a problem with the fuel system. So far we have only used the medium tyre compound."

It was a successful day for WILLIAMS, as the team logged nearly 100 laps. "We successfully completed the majority of our planned test programme today with Pastor covering 97 laps," chief operations engineer Mark Gillan said. "We performed a mixture of mechanical and aerodynamic set-up tests, in addition to continued engine and KERS systems checks. Bruno will have his first outing in the car tomorrow as we switch driver for the final two days of the test."

CATERHAM appear to have started the season as they mean to go on – reliably, and with a working KERS unit. "An excellent day of testing and I want to congratulate Heikki and the whole team for the job we have done today," chief technical officer Mike Gascoyne said. "We ran KERS for the first time and completed everything we had planned with that system, so thank you to Red Bull Technology and Renault Sport F1 for helping make that part of the program run so smoothly. Today we were concentrating on the setup program, using long runs to really start understanding what this car can do, so having completed 139 laps we have made a huge amount of progress, particularly compared to last year, and now we have to make sure we keep up this sort of momentum for the rest of the tests."

While HRT are running last year's car, they're testing out their new team. "The two days of testing have served as good practice for the team, the majority of which is new, the equipment, which is also new, and also as a chance for Pedro to try out last year’s car and regain feelings at the steering wheel," chief engineer Toni Cuquerella said. "We haven’t experienced major problems and completed the test programme with both the systems and the team working well. We’ve also extracted enough data from the new compound tyres with this car to be able to compare it with the data regarding 2011’s tyres and reach conclusions that will help us for the next tests. Therefore we can say that we’ve met our targets for these tests. When we arrive in Barcelona with the new car, everything else will be in place so we can fully concentrate on the car."

Check back here tomorrow for the latest news direct from the teams.

For launch articles and technical specs of the McLaren, Ferrari, Force India, Lotus, Sauber, Red Bull, Toro Rosso, and Williams, check out f1katewalker. Additional coverage of the Jerez tests can also be found at that link. For regular updates from the circuit, follow @F1Kate on Twitter. Kate Walker

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