Scuderia Toro Rosso's 2007 challenger, the STR2, made it track debut at the Circuit de Catalunya on Wednesday, with Vitantonio Liuzzi behind the wheel after the 'launch' on Tuesday.
Liuzzi completed 43 'relatively' trouble-free laps in total, as he concentrated on a series of systems checks in advance of the teams' first proper test next week in Bahrain, which runs from February 22-24. His best time in the
Ferrari powered machine was a 1 minute 26.296 seconds, which left him at the bottom of the timesheets, over half a second off
Super Aguri's
Takuma Sato, who was 18th and around four seconds off
David Coulthard, who set the pace in the Red Bull-
Renault RB3.
"The last few weeks have been a real rush for all of us," admitted
STR chief engineer, Laurent Mekies. "So it was great to see our new car finally running and completing a respectable 43 laps. This was very much a shakedown and systems check, with no thought of setting quick lap times. Now, we must push very hard over the coming weeks to make up for the fact we have only started running quite late."
For the record, Scuderia Toro Rosso had been due to run the STR2 late on Tuesday, but when a red flag stopped the session with just five minutes of test time remaining, the team were left to wait until today.
To see more pictures of the STR2
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