The two Team Lotus race drivers had a productive Friday in Valencia but reserve driver Karun Chandhok completed just two laps in the morning practice session after his gear box failed.
Heikki Kovalainen was in the car for both sessions, and feels that everything is on course for a decent weekend: “A pretty straightforward day for me,” said the Finn. “The car improved throughout both sessions and having got through the whole plan on both tyres we have enough data to work on overnight to find some more speed tomorrow.”
Jarno Trulli, who sat out the morning session to allow Chandhok time in his car, had no reliability problems in the afternoon session. He completed 25 laps of the Valencia street circuit during the 90 minute session.
“That was a good afternoon for me and thanks to the team for the job they did today,” said the Italian. “We worked on a couple of power steering options and I’m pretty pleased with what we found on the second option. We got through a decent number of laps and even though we didn’t have much time to work on setup options I think we’re moving in the right direction so it’ll be interesting to see how we’ve progressed tomorrow.”
Chief Technical Officer Mike Gascoyne explained the issue that ended Chandhok’s session prematurely and says that there is more to come from the team as the weekend progresses.
“Unfortunately this morning Karun had a gearbox issue with second gear which cut his run in FP1 short – that was a new gearbox so we need to work with Red Bull Technology to understand how that happened and put it right,” Gascoyne said. “In FP2 Jarno had a trouble free afternoon and Heikki worked through his full programme for the day, however today’s times do not reflect where we expect to be tomorrow so the focus for tonight is on extracting more performance from the car and pushing ahead tomorrow.”
