McLaren driver Heikki Kovalainen finished this week’s testing session at a hot and steamy Jerez circuit in Southern Spain at the top of the timesheets, the Finn completing a total of 116 laps, the most by any driver here today, to finish three and half tenths faster than the Toro Rosso of Sebastien Bourdais.

David Coulthard was third fastest for Red Bull and while the programme earlier in the week included long term development and assessment of the 2009 slick tyres, the Scot focused exclusively on the forthcoming races of this season, only running this year’s tyres to end up third quickest on the day. The testing ban now comes into force, which means the next outing for the test team takes place at the Monza circuit at the end of August.

On his second day of testing for the team here this week, Romain Grosjean was a pleasing fourth fastest for Renault…

"It was a good day with Romain and he settled into the programme quite quickly,” said Christian Silk, Chief Test Engineer. “He was giving good feedback to the engineers and showed consistency on the long runs this morning. So it was another encouraging day with him. We did some work for the forthcoming races with the set-up of the car and also continued evaluating the suspension developments, which have given some interesting results that we will analyse back at the factory."

Felipe Massa was fifth for Ferrari followed by the Williams of Kazuki Nakajima.

“The AT&T Williams team wrapped up a very hot and humid four day test at Jerez today,” said Rod Nelson, Chief Operations Engineer. “Test driver Nico Hulkenberg drove for the first day and completed set-up work and onboard systems checks before handing the car over to the two race drivers for the next three days of driving duties. Over the four days, the team completed some extensive testing on the latest generation of Bridgestone slick tyres adding to the knowledge base required to optimise the cars for the new regulations in 2009. Back on this year’s grooved rubber, both drivers then did some work on systems and set-ups in preparation for next weekend’s Hungarian Grand Prix where we expect similar weather.”

	DRIVER	TEAM	BEST	LAPS
1	KOVALAINEN	McLaren	1 :18.385	116
2	BOURDAIS	Toro Rosso	1 :18.746	113
3	COULTHARD	Red Bull Racing	1 :19.494	93
4	GROSJEAN	ING Renault F1 Team	1 :19.561	90
5	MASSA	Ferrari	1 :19.611	92
6	NAKAJIMA	Williams	1 :19.724	100
7	HEIDFELD	BMW	1 :19.915	99
8	SUTIL	Force India	1 :19.965	72
9	BUTTON	Honda	1 :20.532	98
10	KOBAYASHI	Toyota	1 :20.878	90