Trulli: Still room for improvement

TOYOTA

Monday 11th February 2008

Jarno Trulli concedes there's still room for improvement with Toyota's new TF108 after he was once again outpaced by the Ferraris in Bahrain on Sunday.

Trulli and Toyota are currently testing alongside Ferrari at the Sakhir circuit. However, the Cologne team's 2008 challenger has yet to pose a threat to Ferrari's F2008, which has dominated the timesheets on the opening two days of testing.

While Ferrari's Kimi Raikkonen clocked a 1:30.015 on Sunday, Trulli could only manage a 1:30.944, leaving the Toyota driver to concede the team still has a lot of work to do before the start of the new season.

"It was a good day. We did a lot of laps and successfully simulated a race distance without any trouble. We did some set-up work this morning and the lap times show we are moving forward," he said.

"We still have work to do but we are definitely going in the right direction and that is very positive. I was pretty happy with the car today, even during the long runs.

"Obviously there is still room for improvement so we will study the data and push hard to improve our car."

However, Toyota's chief race engineer Dieter Gass is confident that this year's car is a huge step up from last year's TF107, which bagged only 13 points during the 2007 Championship.

"It was encouraging to see the TF108 is a big improvement over the TF107 if you compare the times today with last year's race," Gass said.

"We ran different settings during the simulation and it was positive to see how consistent the cars were during the race, especially Jarno's car.

"We learn about different aspects of the car's behaviour during a race simulation and we are able to compare things between the two cars so we have gained a lot of useful information.

"Again it was very good to see the TF108 running reliably, which it has done all year so far, and the pit crew did a good job with the four stops we made during the race."

Post to del.icio.us