“It was a difficult day because we had a problem on the car,” concurred Trulli, who brought up the rear on the timesheets, half a second behind his team-mate after completing 60 laps. “Unfortunately I spent some time in the garage while this was fixed, but that is part of testing.
“Obviously it wasn't ideal, but we have more days here where we will work to better understand the balance and behaviour of the car. At the moment we are still in the first stages of our preparation; we have updates and more performance to come.”
The Italian will continue his programme on day three on Wednesday, alongside the squad's third driver Kamui Kobayashi. Senior general chassis manager Pascal Vasselon was keen to stress that the new machine was getting better by the day.
“Our focus today was again on developing the baseline set-up by trying different mechanical solutions,” the Frenchman explained, “but unfortunately we lost a bit of time on both cars due to gearbox issues. That was a shame but we have been testing various parts, including the new gearbox, and we will learn from these issues to improve our package before the season starts.
“We lost some time but we didn't really lose any mileage as such because the reliability of the TF108 so far has been very good and we would have needed to control the mileage anyway. We carried out some productive work today, and I feel we are improving constantly as we learn more about the TF108's characteristics.”
To see the testing times in full,
click here
