Ferrari find form
Ferrari showed off their new car in style in practice for the Bahrain Grand Prix this morning with Michael Schumacher and Rubens Barrichello setting the fastest times of the race drivers.
Test drivers have no restrictions on engines so are able to push harder in Friday practice and Toyota’s Ricardo Zonta set the quickest time of one minute 31.449 seconds.
But Schumacher was just 0.671secs behind on the debut of Ferrari’s new car, introduced two races early in response to a poor start to the season.
Red Bull test driver Vitantonio Liuzzi was third with McLaren counterpart Alex Wurz fourth before Barrichello took the honour of being the second fastest race driver, in fifth overall.
Pedro de la Rosa’s first session as a McLaren racer saw the Spaniard, who is filling on for the injured Juan Pablo Montoya, take sixth.
Jenson Button brought his BAR-Honda home ninth while David Coulthard was 13th for Red Bull.
At the start of the session, Wurz’s chance to impress as McLaren’s temporary third driver was interrupted when the Austrian was forced to park his car with an apparent mechanical problem.
With de la Rosa promoted to race driver for this weekend, former Benetton driver Wurz found himself again in the spotlight but that turned sour when he was forced to help marshals push his McLaren to the sidelines before even setting a time.
Zonta set the early standard as the test drivers and back-of-the-grid teams used the opportunity to clock up extra miles.
Minardi’s Christijan Albers ran wide after 20 minutes and found himself on an escape road. The Dutchman took a detour through the support race pits but had to wait while marshals cleared a road block for him to proceed.
With the seldomly-used circuit presenting a dusty surface, few of the top runners made much attempt to entertain the sparse crowd, with just seven of the 24 drivers setting lap times after 40 minutes.
Narain Karthikeyan came close to an embarrassing clash with Jordan team-mate Tiago Montiero when he outbraked himself, but the Indian escaped unscathed.
De la Rosa’s first lap as a McLaren race driver put the Spaniard second, but Red Bull tester Liuzzi dropped him down a spot when he went fastest with just over 10 minutes remaining.
Button’s first series of quick laps put him fourth but he suffered a scary moment when his BAR twitched dramatically in a corner and forced him wide.
With three minutes to go Barrichello had the honour of setting the first timed lap for Ferrari’s new car but could only manage 11th, three seconds down on Zonta.
Schumacher was swift to improve on that and his first effort took third spot before stepping up to second in the final seconds as Barrichello also improved.
