TESTING: Jerez Round Up

By Karl King
December 5 2004

Ralf Schumacher and Jarno Trulli shared Panasonic Toyota Racing testing duties at Jerez, Spain last week. Unfortunately, it was wet all week...

Ralf was there Wednesday, Thursday and Friday testing in unpredictable weather in the TF104/09B working on wet set-up, traction control and tyres. He completed 173 laps, with a fastest lap of 1m29.069. This is what he thought....

"Unfortunately the weather this week has been pretty unreliable and very unstable, so that's disrupted our planned programme. We ran with a few new aerodynamic parts as an early preparation for 2005 but I did not have any dry running all week, so it's difficult to draw any real conclusions. Hopefully it will be dry here next week and we can get through more of our programme. Here, the rain meant most of our productive work has been on traction control and testing out wet tyres from Michelin. We put in some work on shallow wets on Thursday, but for most of the afternoon the track wasn't driveable so we decided to spend most of the time in the garage so as not to risk the car. On Friday we put in more laps and got through our programme of tyre comparisons. The car has been pretty easy to control in the wet so, like in Barcelona, I've again been pleasantly surprised."

Jarno partnered Ralf on Wednesday, and took on the sole responsibility on Saturday. He worked on traction control, wet set-up, tyres and electronics over a total of 143 laps in the TF104/10B. His fastest lap was just under 3 seconds faster than Ralf's with a 1m19.287. He said:

"I've carried out a lot less testing than I was expecting this week because of a problem with my eye. On the evening after our first day here my eye became very painful. When I went to see a specialist, he found a tiny piece of metal had lodged in it, which I guess I must have picked up while I was testing. He was able to take it out, but the discomfort meant that I had to miss out on driving the car for two days. I felt okay after that and I was able to resume on the last day. Apart from that, the week was disrupted by the changeable weather. On the days that I did run I tried out the car in wet conditions and we did some work on electronics. We also tried a downforce level similar to what we can expect next year, but it was difficult to measure performance due to the changing track conditions."