TESTING: Jerez

By Karl King
January 15 2005

Jarno Trulli, Ricardo Zonta and Ralf Schumacher have all been representing Panasonic Toyota Racing at Jerez this week. In a very sunny week, Ralf joined the action in the TF105 on both Tuesday and Wednesday completing 109 laps, covering 482.7km throughout these two days.

When asked for his initial impressions of the TF105 he replied "We are happy with what we've seen so far on the TF105, and I think it is a competitive package. It handles well and it is one of the few cars which I have thought was a very good car from the start – even if the new rules make it slightly slower." He summarised by saying "We still need to carry out work to find out more about it but the baseline is really good, so I am really pleased with the job the team has done." Ralf was working on baseline work, and set a best time of 1m18.242s.

Ricardo and Jarno took over for Thursday and Friday. Ricardo ran the TF104/B and set a lap time about 1.5 seconds faster than the TF105 did in the week under the control of Trulli and Schumacher. Ricardo completed 263 laps throughout his two days covering a total distance of 1164.6km. Working on tyres, he set a best lap time of 1m16.672s. When asked what the main benefit of running the TF104/B he responded "When it comes to tyres, it doesn't matter which car you are running. The information can be correlated directly from one car to the other. But of course we have changed some of the parameters on the TF104B – like the downforce settings – to bring them closer to the 2005 car."

Jarno was working on baseline work throughout the test, setting a best lap time of 1m18.048s. He covered 752.8km which is 170 laps in total. He was running in the same chassis as Ralf earlier in the week, the TF105/02 and when he was later asked what area of the 2005 contender needs most attention, he said "So far, the new rules mean that the grip level is lower than what I'm used to, but I'm sure we will recuperate that before and during the season. Apart from that I would prefer to keep testing and trying different things to know the car better. To date things are going reasonably well. Now we have to keep discovering and resolving all the problems that you always get with a new car, but I am optimistic because the team and the car are working well."

Mike Gascoyne summarised the weeks testing by commenting "This Jerez test has effectively been a week-long shakedown, doing basic systems checks on all the different areas of the car. The job here has really been to get all those checks out of the way so that we can understand better how the car works. Only after that can we begin more detailed work on setting up the car. Although we have done some work on balancing the car, we still have much to learn. With the TF104B if we have a balance problem we know how to change it because we have done it in all kinds of conditions, but with the TF105 we don't yet have all that information. That is work you need to do in a controlled way, step by step."

Testing will resume next week, at Barcelona. Mike revealed the programme for the week for us; "In Barcelona we will have our second new TF105 chassis available and our race drivers are scheduled to run for four days each in the new package from next Tuesday (18 January). That is when we can start the detailed work on set-up, fine-tuning the balance and looking to extract performance. A typical programme would be that one car would look at a front camber scan while the other does a rear camber scan. Then, one would run stiffer on roll bars while the other goes stiffer on springs, or one might move the weight distribution forward, the other rearward. That way we can start to build up the big picture."

Bring on next week!