'Annoyed' Virgin hoping for a change in fortune

Two days of 'encouragement' have finally dwindled into 'annoyance' for Virgin Racing as the delay in parts arriving kept their running to just eight laps on Friday.

Despite being the first of the newcomers to get their 2010 challenger out on track, Virgin's first F1 test has been anything but successful.

Instead of spending the past three days out on track, Virgin have spent the bulk of it waiting in their garage for various parts to arrive.

The late arrival following Thursday's front wing failure meant Lucas di Grassi had less than two hours of track time on Friday, completing just eight laps. Those eight bring Virgin's total number completed to 24.

The team's efforts also weren't helped by the dismal weather at Jerez.

"Once again, despite working round-the-clock to remedy yesterday's problem, we not only missed the opportunity for dry running early this morning, but it was so wet this afternoon that we and all the other teams lost a lot of running later in the session when we were finally able to get going," said tech boss Nick Wirth.

"This was particularly annoying given the great efforts by Wirth Research who, rather than just dispatching existing parts from our Bicester base, designed and manufactured new parts, R&D tested them and got them out to the circuit within a 24 hour period.

"Nevertheless, as was the case with the early issues we encountered with last year's Championship-winning LMP1 Acura, the harder you work, the luckier you get and with the hours we are putting in at the moment we are all hoping that our fortunes will change soon!

"The drivers remain positive, the data we are gathering is as expected and we're all keeping our heads down and just getting on with what we need to do at this early stage in our development."

Source: 'Annoyed' Virgin hoping for a change in fortune - Planet-F1 News from planet-f1.com