Di Resta fourth quickestposted in F101 | 02 | 2011
BATHGATE'S PAUL di Resta immediately showed he will be a force in this year's Formula One season when he finished today's opening day of testing in Valencia fourth-fastest, just 0.692s behind world champ Sebastian Vettel.
While times in testing are notoriously difficult to analyse — it's often like comparing apples with oranges as different teams run different fuel loads and programmes — it's worth highlighting Vettel was in his brand new 2011 Red Bull; di Resta was running a revised version of his 2010 Force India.
"Yeh, I'm happy with that," di Resta said today as he shielded his eyes from the late afternoon Spanish sun, "and there's more to come. I was really keen to get back into the car this afternoon after the winter lay-off, and it immediately felt good.
"For me, today was all about establishing a good, solid baseline from which we can build from tomorrow. Now that we've established that, we can concentrate on going through the full programme which will ultimately feed through to the development of the new car which we launch in Jerez next week."
While new Force India test driver Nico Hulkenberg ran the car for much of the day — racking up 71 laps, setting a quickest time of 1min 13.938secs and finishing the day second fastest, just 0.169s behind Vettel — di Resta completed only 28 laps.
"That was always the plan," di Resta, who finally took to the track at 2.40pm local time, continued. "It was important for Nico to get a good feel of the car on his first outing. The weather forecast for the next couple of days is fairly good, so we should see the times coming down a bit more tomorrow."
Di Resta will drive the Force India car for tomorrow's full session before handing it over to team-mate Adrian Sutil on Thursday.
Vettel again showed his class in topping the timesheets, with the McLaren of test driver Gary Paffett third, 0.354s behind Hulkenberg's Force India.
With di Resta fourth, double world champ Fernando Alonso had to content himself with fifth in the 2011 Ferrari F150. The Spaniard completed 97 laps, yet ended the day 0.092s behind the Scot who completed 69 fewer laps in a year-old car.
Renault made a slow start to 2011 with Vitaly Petrov doing just six laps before a long break for the new R31. The Russian returned in the afternoon to complete another 22 laps and finished eighth.
There was frustration though for Mercedes and Michael Schumacher. Just hours after it officially unveiled its 2011 racer, it embarrassingly ground to a halt on the start/finish straight with a hydraulic leak.
The seven-times world champ ended the day ninth, 2.681s off the pace, with team-mate Nico Rosberg 13th and last of the runners, 6.161s behind Vettel.
Tomorrow Lotus will join the 11 teams which ran in today's first official test of the 2011 Formula One season.
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Jim McGill