TESTING: Barcelona

By Karl King
January 22 2005

Panasonic Toyota Racing were represented by both Jarno and Ralf from Tuesday. Oliver joined the fun on the last 2 days in sunny weather. RS and JT were running the TF105/02 and 03 chassis respectively, with Panis running the TF1054/11B. Bit of a mouthful, but its basically the 104B with a few 105 aero parts stuck on it...

Once again, Jarno completed the most laps, completing 284 laps of the Circuit de Catalunya. Of couse, Trulli didn't set the fastest Toyota time as Olivier was running an 04 car, but he did set a very respectable fastest lap of 1m17.353s covering a distance of 1314.07km. When asked how productive the test had been, he replied "The conditions didn't improve enough during the week to make it possible to do much meaningful work on the performance of the TF105. In the cold mornings it is especially slippery, then as the sun comes out and the track cleans up the wind gets up too. Instead we concentrated on getting mileage under our belts, working on the reliability side of the new car. From that point of view things have gone pretty well." Also asked how he found the conditions he had this to say: "The Barcelona circuit has changed a lot since they resurfaced the tarmac and at the start of the week we had a lot of problems getting used to the new asphalt. The grip level was very low, making it very slippery, and those problems continued for most of the week. In the end, the times people were able to record weren't as bad as some had feared, but it was still slower than before."

Ralf's best time was a 1m17.490s. He covered 222 laps which is 1027.19km. Some teams did abandon the circuit earlier in the week due to problems with the new tarmac, when asked why Toyota stayed, he replied "The Circuit de Catalunya was very slippery to start with, and some teams made a decision not to test here as a result. But we thought it was better to stay here in order to get some running time at the circuit and find out about any problems we might encounter at the Spanish Grand Prix here in May. As it turned out, with quite a few cars running on the track, by about Thursday afternoon more rubber had gone down and the conditions became more reasonable." Of course what we all want to know is if the TF105 has made any progress this week. Schumacher responded "We have not been able to make much progress with the TF105 because of the track conditions. However, we made good use of our time here to put mileage on the car, before a bit of tyre testing on the last day. The most productive thing about the week was that we had some small reliability issues on my car, which we were able to find and cure early. That actually made the test very useful for us."

Olivier Panis made a show as a tester on the 20th and 21st January, working on tyres. When asked if the new asphalt had made a difference on how the tyres work, Panis replied "It's been difficult to pick the best Michelin tyres from our tyre testing in Barcelona this week. Normally the track here is very aggressive from the point of view of graining, so you need hard tyres. But this week because it has been very slippery we haven't had any graining and the track has suited softer tyres more than usual. That in turn has made it difficult to find the right way to develop, but we still managed to find some good tyres, which is positive." Oliver completed only 181 laps this week, but will also be testing today [Saturday.] When asked the plan for today he replied "We have a wet tyre test planned tomorrow [today, Saturday], although I think the conditions here in the wet could make it very hard. It is already difficult to run in the dry here, so I expect it will be extremely difficult in the wet."