"We got off to a good start this morning, with Adrian very quickly getting used to the seamless shift gearbox. After some running however a minor mechanical issue caused some downtime, but with two good days and over 800km running beforehand, it was not a major problem for us as that is what testing is about," added
Force India chief race and test engineer, Dominic Harlow.
"In the afternoon we again tested the 2009 development tyres, allowing Adrian to get some more experience of driving on slicks. Overall it's been a good test with more than 1,000km over the three days and we feel well prepared for Hungary."
The only other runners on track were
Honda's
Jenson Button and
Toyota third driver Kamui Kobayashi and neither of them managed to break the 1 minute 20 marker.
"We ran the car with our latest aero and suspension developments today to complete the evaluations which have been ongoing all week," said Jenson. "The new parts have made a small but tangible improvement to the stability of the car, which is particularly evident over longer runs, so it has been a positive day. It will be interesting to see how this translates over the race weekend in Hungary."
Kobayashi was also happy with how things went: "That was a busy day of testing for us and it went well. We spent most of the day working towards the race in Budapest next week and we made good progress," he stated. "Late on we switched our attentions to
Bridgestone's slick tyres for 2009. The track obviously changes quite a lot during the day here, becoming more difficult for testing in the heat of the afternoon, but we weren't looking for lap times. We had a lot of different aero parts to try, we completed our programme and we collected some useful data."
There will now be no testing until the end of next month as the summer test ban comes into force. Monza will host the next
F1 group test, with testing due to take place from August 27-29.
