Toro Rosso continue to shine
Date published : 12 Feb 2010 - 20:28:11
Toro Rosso's impressive pre-season testing pace continued on Friday as Jamie Alguersuari topped the timesheets in Jerez - but once again it was the weather which overshadowed proceedings.
Just as on the first day of testing on Wednesday, incessant rain severely hampered the teams' efforts, with just one hour of dry running possible on Friday morning before the heavens opened.
Alguersuari was one of a handful of drivers to set a time in the dry, his time of one minute 19.919 seconds over eight-tenths faster than second-placed man Pedro de la Rosa in the Sauber.
Toro Rosso have consistently been on the pace in Jerez, with Alguersuari's efforts following on the heels of Sebastien Buemi's second-placed efforts of both on Thursday - when the weather remained dry for the duration - and Wednesday.
The new Force India car continued its impressive pace at the team's first pre-season test of the year as Adrian Sutil claimed third despite stopping with an electrical problem which limited the German to 48 laps.
"I'm very confident on the general speed of the car," said Sutil. "Unfortunately the rain came in quite early and then it was really waiting for reasonable conditions to go out. We had a problem in the afternoon that caused us to miss a bit of track time, but considering it was so wet it would have been very difficult to get a lot of running in anyway."
Felipe Massa was fourth for Ferrari after completing 72 laps while Sebastian Vettel's first outing in the new Red Bull Racing RB6 produced a best time of 1min 21.783secs from 59 laps, good for fifth place.
Vitaly Petrov was impressive for Renault as he claimed sixth place after 68 laps, most of which came in the wet with the Russian rookie rarely putting a foot wrong.
Nico Rosberg was down in seventh place as he took over driving duties from Michael Schumacher at Mercedes, while Rubens Barrichello defied the elements and a red flag-inducing spin to rack up 120 laps for Williams on his way to eighth.
Lewis Hamilton could manage only ninth in McLaren's new MP4-25, although the team revealed they used the window of dry weather early in the day to undertake aero-mapping runs which were conducted at lower speeds.
