Ferrari continue at Valencia

Day two for Ferrari at the Valencia circuit in Spain as they continued to analyse the F10 chassis and continue the work the team done on Monday. Once again for Ferrari it was Felipe Massa at the wheel, the Brazilian driver starting the day in a black helmet as he was testing a prototype helmet for for Schuberth, and he was quick right away setting a faster time than he had done on Monday. Ferrari had spent Monday working on a baseline setup for the F10 and analysing the performance of the new Bridgestone tyres and this work continued on Tuesday.

It was reported that Ferrari were running with the super soft and soft compounds today, which explains why Felipe was instantly quicker than he had been the day before. Felipe covered a total of 124 laps today which is great news for Ferrari as far as reliability goes, so much better than last season with the KERS problems. Massa's best time was 1.11.722 but as yet we have no idea what fuel loads the teams are running.

Felipe was also working on various set-ups to see how the car would react along with tyre behaviour, all seemed well and Felipe declared the feeling for the car as great. Ferrari are delighted so far with the reliability of the car with over 900 kilometres completed without a problem, a big boost for the factory who spent lots of time on the test benches. Tomorrow Ferrari will be back on track once again with Fernando Alonso making his long awaited debut for the Scuderia. Felipe in the meantime is returning to Brazil to be with his wife and family, he will return for the test at Jerez.

"I’m really happy, because it has been quite a while I’ve driven so many kilometres at once,” Felipe said at the end of the day. “For me it’s very positive, I feel fine from a physical point of view, but especially the car has a very good start. We’re satisfied by the work done up to now: we’ve been working on the set up and in the afternoon we started to compare the tyres under different conditions. With lots of petrol on board the car behaves differently, but we didn’t experience any surprises. As far as the tyres are concerned we need to understand well how they work on other and harder tracks than this here, but especially how they behave with higher temperatures. Where we’re standing compared to the others? That’s impossible to say, it’s really too early!"

During the lunch break Felipe received an unexpected visitor, Michael Schumacher. The German driver couldn’t resist the Italian cuisine and wanted to taste a plate of Spaghetti aglio, olio and peperoncino prepared by the Scuderia’s chef Carmine. "What we said to each other? Nothing in particular," Felipe said to the journalists with a smile. "We’re friends and we’re talking quite often to each other: today I think he was just homesick for our motorhome, because we have the better food here than anywhere else in the world of Formula 1!"

Final Times

Massa 1m11.722
Kobayashi 1m12.056
Hamilton 1m12.256
Kubica 1m12.426
Rosberg 1m12.899
Barrichello 1m13.377
Buemi 1m13.823