22 JULY 2011
It was a cool day in the Eifel Mountains, but the team gets some valuable work done in the run-up to Timo's home Grand Prix.
The Nürburgring is a bit like Spa in terms of weather conditions, but at least it remained dry throughout the day.
In the morning,, track temperature never went higher than 19 degrees, making it hard to get heat into the tyres, so the team focused on engine and aero mapping tests. Pirelli have brought Hard and Soft tyres for the event, along with some experimental Soft compounds for use during FP1 and FP2. Working on the basis that the afternoon was likely to be warmer, we restricted our morning runs to using Primes.
In the afternoon, Timo ran only with the two types of Soft tyre while Jérôme also ran a longer run with Primes before switching to the two Soft compounds. Timo finished the day 19th, Jérôme was 21st. As usual the cars behaved reliably, covering a total of 110 laps.
Timo Glock
“This morning we wanted to focus on our aero program and therefore we didn’t do any real set-up work, so we only used the Prime tyres, which are slower than the two soft options. I think the second session was reasonable for us. I’m not 100% happy but I think it was a good start to the weekend. I felt comfortable in the car and I’m very happy to be in Germany and racing at home in front of the fantastic German fans.”
Jérôme D’Ambrosio
“It was a smooth Friday, certainly in comparison to Silverstone where we were disturbed by the weather. We got some good testing done and I’m quite confident for tomorrow. I still need to fine-tune my driving to the track but I’m definitely pretty happy about today.”
John Booth
“The morning session was spent in part going over some old ground, confirming the engine mapping direction to ensure we were getting maximum aero performance. We also experimented with some set-ups which we arrived at from the data we collected at the straight line test. There is certainly quite a significant difference between the Prime and Option tyres, particularly at the start of the run, and in fact with Timo we opted not to run the Prime tyres in the second session to get more useful set-up work. At the end of the session we’ve acquired even more data than we would normally achieve on a Friday to go through, which we are hopeful will yield some improvements that we can apply overnight.”
Credit: Virgin Racing (www.virginracing.com)
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