Force India F1 Team’s preparation for the start of the 2010 FIA Formula One World Championship continued in testing at Barcelona as Tonio worked through an intensive programme that included a full race distance. After completing shorter runs in the morning, where he clocked his fastest time of 1:21.056, the fourth quickest of the day, Tonio started a race simulation after the lunchtime break. Aside from a red flag period shortly after his second stop for tyres, the VJM03 performed reliably throughout the day.

Tonio said: “We can be quite happy about today’s programme. We completed everything without any issues and the car showed very good reliability, even when we did the race simulation. Again it is responding very well and we are improving day by day so everything is looking positive. We still don’t know where we are relative to the others, and we will only see in Bahrain, but overall we can be really happy. We now have two more days of testing to try and get as much information as possible.”