Force India fourth quickest in F1 testing

JEREZ - Force India’s Vitantonio Liuzzi clocked the day’s fourth fastest time of one minute, 19.650 seconds as the pre-season Formula One test session concluded here.

The Italian, driving a VJM03, covered 80 laps of the Spanish track Saturday with a programme that included work on set-up and understanding the car’s behaviour with the heavier fuel loads necessitated by the race refuelling ban this year.

The team’s testing programme will now move to Barcelona next week (Feb 25-28). Liuzzi will drive for the first two days, with Adrian Sutil taking over for the final two days.

Summing up the session, Liuzzi said: “Today was a really productive day for us. We covered 80 laps without any issues and got through our programme of test items for this week. Everything went pretty well. We worked on understanding the car’s performance with different fuel loads and ran through some set-up changes and the car is responding well.

“We still need to work on the tyres over the longer runs and will continue this at the next test in Barcelona. Overall, I think we can be very satisfied with how this test has gone and can look forward to another good test next week.”

Topping the time chart was World champion Jenson Button of McLaren-Mercedes who clocked 1:18.871 while doing 108 laps. Robert Kubica in a Renault was second quickest in 1:19.114 (117 laps), ahead of Kamui Kobayashi of Sauber-Ferrari (1:19.188, 117 laps).