Virgin Racing technical director Nick Wirth said their latest appearance in a Formula One group at Jerez was "character-building".
Virgin technical director admits team have fallen behind schedule
Virgin Racing technical director Nick Wirth said their latest appearance in a Formula One group at Jerez was "character-building".
Last week's four-day test was the new team's second appearance ahead of the new season and came after their first outing, also at Jerez, was hampered by a shortage of parts.
Components for the VR-01 were again at a premium during their second outing at the Spanish track, with a hydraulic problem keeping drivers Timo Glock and Lucas di Grassi in the pits for long spells.
Despite his assertion that the same problem will not reoccur during the final pre-season test at Barcelona later this week, Wirth did admit the team had fallen behind schedule as a result.
"It has been a character-building week, that's for sure!," he said.
"Despite our best efforts to cure the hydraulic problem which has beset our entire test, this was simply not achievable with the components that we had available in the field.
"The specific problem is that we have been losing hydraulic oil at a rate which has limited the number of laps we can achieve on each run and so we look forward to receiving updated parts for the Barcelona test, which we expect to fully resolve the problem.
"Having said that, we will now need to continue focusing on reliability work when we would have liked to introduce our Bahrain-specification aerodynamic updates.
"The revised programme means we will be reserving our full set of aero warpaint for the first race."
When the car was able to take to the track, Glock in particular was able to move away from the bottom of the timesheets.
The German driver finished two of his three days within four seconds of the pacesetters - although Wirth said the car did not reveal its true pace.
"On a positive note, despite these issues, we have actually completed a lot of good race preparation work and it is satisfying to see the car's potential with minimum set-up changes or development, bearing in mind that we have consistently run with a healthy amount of fuel," he added.
"Indeed, none of our lap times have been achieved with anything close to qualifying fuel and therefore we are not letting the frustrations in one specific area overshadow what has generally been an encouraging start to our development programme."
