Virgin Racing face first challenge as car sheds its front wing

VIRGIN RACING have endured a difficult competitive track baptism in Jerez which resulted yesterday in the team having to abandon testing for the day when the car's front wing fell off.

The Yorkshire team, born out of the Manor Motorsport marque at Dinnington in Rotherham, were well off the pace set by the rest of the field on day one and then ran out of parts midway through yesterday's morning session.

The team's No 1 driver Timo Glock was putting the car through its paces when the front wing of the VR-01 car fell off and without a replacement to hand they had to call a halt to the session.

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Twenty-four hours earlier, Germany's Glock could only manage four laps at Jerez and was a worrying 17 seconds down on the time clocked by pace-setter and countryman Nico Rosberg of Mercedes.

The time owed much to it being clocked on a wet track compared to the dry-test Rosberg enjoyed earlier in the day.

Virgin Racing had been unable to take part in Wednesday's morning session because they had spent the night integrating new parts and practices into the car developed from the data gleaned at last week's initial Silverstone test.

However, even yesterday, when all cars were testing in the dry, Glock was still 9.9 seconds off the pace having completed just 11 laps when the front-wing problem materialised.

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He was lapping at 1m 29.964secs while Toro Rosso's Sebastien Buemi topped the timesheets at 1.20:066.

Glock was also lapping six seconds behind the second slowest driver, Kamui Kobayashi of Sauber, who completed nearly five times as many laps as the black and red Virgin car.

A maiden track debut was always going to be about reliabilty over competitiveness and with two more sessions in Jerez and eight more days of testing still to be conducted in Spain throughout February, there is still time for kinks to be ironed out ahead of the opening grand prix of the season in Bahrain next month.

The fact that they are testing publicly while the other three new teams – Campos Meta, US F1 and Lotus – are yet to take to the track, shows the significant strides taken by John Booth's team which has effectively been built from scratch.

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However, with the VR-01 being the first car to be built using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) rather than the conventional methods of using a wind tunnel, the scrutiny over their performance is going to be intense in their first season on the grid. This setback does not jeopardise their participation in Bahrain but after progressing smoothly through all the major roadblocks on the road to the first of 19 races in the Formula 1 season, this is the first major challenge facing the team.

Virgin Racing's technical director Nick Wirth, the brains behind the radical CFD design, said yesterday: "We experienced a front wing mounting problem which caused the wing to come off the car at the beginning of a run.

"The cause has already been identified. Unfortunately, we're missing one or two spare parts which will hopefully arrive this evening (last night), so we weren't able to run for the rest of the day."

Glock now makes way, as previously scheduled, for Brazilian Lucas di Grassi to test the car over the final two days of the second official pre-season session and Wirth remains confident the team can fix the front wing problem and get some quality lap time under their belts.

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Wirth said: "In the short amount of running that we've achieved so far, we are very encouraged by what we've seen and we have gathered some vital aero data which is very much in the range of what we were predicting.

"We look forward to resuming the programme this morning."

Formula 1 rookies Lotus are set to join Virgin in Jerez next week while the FIA yesterday delivered a stark warning to the new teams about their participation in races.

Aimed primarily at Campos Meta and US F1 – who have both said they may have to delay their race debut until the fifth round in Spain in May – the governing body has said that any failure to attend a round of the series would be viewed as an infringement of their regulations.

Teething problems

Parts arrive late ahead of first test on Wednesday and team spend night altering VR-01 car and subsequently miss morning dry-track session.

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Timo Glock manages four laps in wet in afternoon, clocking a best time which is 17 seconds off the pace.

Glock completes just 11 laps in testing yesterday morning before front wing falls off. Best lap nearly 10 seconds slower than fastest car.

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