| US Grand Prix - Free Practice Round-Up |
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| 30.06.2006 |
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BIRTHDAY HARD
Panasonic Toyota Racing today began its preparations for Sunday's Spanish Grand Prix on the outskirts of the city of Barcelona. All the drivers know the Circuit de Catalunya better than any other track after hours and hours of pounding round during tests in all conditions throughout the year. The rain in Spain fell mainly in the morning today, meaning the first practice session began on a damp track and most drivers opted to remain in the garage. Jarno Trulli and Ralf Schumacher both had busier afternoons, successfully completing their programmes of tyre comparison and set-up fine-tuning with over 50 laps between them. They will now look to continue that progress as Toyota seeks a strong result on Sunday. This weekend's event is a sell-out, with 330,000 people expected to attend over the course of the three days.
Jarno Trulli (Car 8, Chassis TF106/08B)
First Session Classification: 17th, 2 laps completed
No lap time
Second Session Classification: 23rd, 16 laps completed
Lap Time: 1m14.449s (+2.436s)
"It was a difficult day due to some problems with the sensors on my car. We also had a lot of graining on our tyres and I had some understeer. We tried to put in a long run in order to understand that better but it has been a disrupted day's work for us. It's hard to predict how we will get on here because it's another track where we do no testing. But while we still have some work to do on reliability, our car is improving with every race. If we get the right conditions and we can get the most out of our tyres then we can expect to be competitive."
Ralf Schumacher (Car 7, Chassis TF106/07B)
First Session Classification: 18th, 2 laps completed
No lap time
Second Session Classification: 27th, 10 laps completed
Lap time: 1m15.063s (+3.050s)
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"The circuit was very slippery today and unfortunately we couldn't complete our programme of work because we had a lot of vibrations on our car. We tried to rectify the problem but it returned towards the end of the second session. So that meant we were unable to put in a lot of laps today and tonight we will need to double-check what is causing the issue. At one point Sato lost a piece of bodywork from his Super Aguri in front of me and I was hit but it doesn't seem to have caused any damage. Now we have to look to tackle these problems for the rest of the weekend."
Dieter Gass - Chief Engineer Race and Test
"We had a number of different problems on the two cars so it was a difficult day's work for us. Nonetheless we still managed to achieve most today's planned programme although we have not been able to complete our tyre evaluation as we would have liked. Now we have to look at the data we do have and decide on what changes to make for tomorrow. After Jarno's good result in Canada last week we should achieve a similar performance here. So we expect to be competitive in qualifying and the race."
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| 1 |
M. Schumacher |
Ferrari |
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| 2 |
F. Massa |
Ferrari |
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| 3 |
G. Fisichella |
Renault |
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| 4 |
N. Heidfeld |
Sauber |
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| 5 |
R. Barrichello |
Honda |
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| 6 |
F. Alonso
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Renault |
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| 7 |
J. Button
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Honda |
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| 8 |
J. Villeneuve
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Sauber |
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more.. |
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