Virgin Racing concluded its second full pre-season test in Jerez on Saturday where Timo Glock climbed back into the cockpit of the VR-01 with the intention of achieving much-needed dry track time in the improved conditions. In the absence of the new parts set to be introduced for this week’s test in Barcelona, the team continued to endure a frustrating time addressing the current hydraulic issue.

Nick Wirth, Technical Director of Virgin Racing, admitted that it has been a tough test for one of Formula One’s newest team’s with a constant hydraulic problem hampering the entire session, however they are confident that new parts aimed at this week’s final test in Barcelona will see the end of the problem once and for all....

“It has been a character-building week, that’s for sure! Despite our best efforts to cure the hydraulic problem which has beset our entire test, this was simply not achievable with the components that we had available in the field,” he explained.

“The specific problem is that we have been losing hydraulic oil at a rate which has limited the number of laps we can achieve on each run and so we look forward to receiving updated parts for the Barcelona test, which we expect to fully resolve the problem.”

“Having said that, we will now need to continue focusing on reliability work when we would have liked to introduce our Bahrain-specification aerodynamic updates. The revised programme means we will be reserving our full set of aero warpaint for the first race.

“On a positive note, despite these issues, we have actually completed a lot of good race preparation work and it is satisfying to see the car’s potential with minimum set-up changes or development, bearing in mind that we have consistently run with a healthy amount of fuel.”

“Indeed, none of our lap times have been achieved with anything close to qualifying fuel and therefore we are not letting the frustrations in one specific area overshadow what has generally been an encouraging start to our development programme.”