Wirth: A character-building week

Nick Wirth has summed Virgin Racing's latest test at Jerez, calling it a "character-building" week.

Virgin's racing first F1 test, which took place at Jerez two weeks ago, saw the team besieged with parts shortages that curtailed their running.

And although for the second outing at the Spanish track they had the parts needed, a 'tricky' hydraulic problem kept rearing its head, leaving Timo Glock and Lucas di Grassi stranded in the pits.

"It has been a character-building week, that's for sure!," Wirth said.

"Despite our best efforts to cure the hydraulic problem which has beset our entire test, this was simply not achievable with the components that we had available in the field/

"The specific problem is that we have been losing hydraulic oil at a rate which has limited the number of laps we can achieve on each run and so we look forward to receiving updated parts for the Barcelona test, which we expect to fully resolve the problem.

"Having said that, we will now need to continue focusing on reliability work when we would have liked to introduce our Bahrain-specification aerodynamic updates. The revised programme means we will be reserving our full set of aero warpaint for the first race."

But when the team was able to run, Glock especially was able to move away from the bottom of the timesheets, finishing two of his three days within four seconds of the leaders.

"On a positive note, despite these issues, we have actually completed a lot of good race preparation work and it is satisfying to see the car's potential with minimum set-up changes or development, bearing in mind that we have consistently run with a healthy amount of fuel.

"Indeed, none of our lap times have been achieved with anything close to qualifying fuel and therefore we are not letting the frustrations in one specific area overshadow what has generally been an encouraging start to our development programme."

Source: Wirth: A character-building week - Planet-F1 News from planet-f1.com