Dark clouds, cooler temperatures and a short period of rain in the afternoon did not drown out Panasonic Toyota Racing’s second day of testing at Paul Ricard.

Ricardo Zonta hit the track later in the morning to work on set-ups and a tyre programme, while Jarno Trulli was able to continue working with the B-car package putting in over 130 laps. Team driver Ralf Schumacher will arrive tomorrow to join Ricardo Zonta for a third day of testing.

Ricardo Zonta

“I feel we had a constructive test, even though it rained in the afternoon and caused some challenging track conditions. Throughout most of the day, we worked on analyzing car behaviour based on issues and data that resulted at the Imola race. In the afternoon, we took advantage of the rain, and ran some wet tyre tests.”

Jarno Trulli

“We spent the day checking different set-ups and balance of the new car. In addition to this, we worked on dry and wet tyres tests as well as preparations for the next race at Nürburgring. I feel the car shows promise, but like everything that is new, we still have work to do and we will see at the next test how the car evolves.”

Dieter Gass, Chief Race and Test Team Engineer

“Altogether we had a good test day. In the morning we spent some time with the old car analyzing and trying to understand some of the issues we had at the race last week. We found some positive results and this is a step forward for us. Both cars were performing tyre tests and we added a wet tyre test to the programme, due to the rainfall that we experienced. The new car was running well without any major issues, which is also very good. We will continue to work on this new car to maximize its potential, but we are happy with the results we gathered today.”

This entry was posted on Friday, April 28th, 2006 at 4:45 pm and is filed under Formula One [t], News and Technology [t]. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.