Sam Bird tops first day of final pre-season Formula E test

The track was dry for the start of testing at midday, and though there were spots of rain through the lunch break and early stages of the afternoon the teams had a decent window of dry running.

Virgin DS Racing driver Bird made the most of it to set a 1m30.451s with an hour and a half remaining in his DSV-01.

That was 0.3s better than Lucas di Grassi managed in the newly-liveried Abt Audi Sport machine, with those two the only to set competitive times at the 200kW qualifying limit.

Dragon Racing's still-to-be confirmed driver Loic Duval and Venturi's Jacques Villeneuve were more than a second away from Bird's best in third and fourth but were equally well clear of their respective team-mates Jerome d'Ambrosio and Stephane Sarrazin.

The day's heaviest rainfall came shortly after Bird posted his benchmark, which restricted teams to wet-weather runs and system checks.

It was a largely quiet day, though there were two incidents of note.

The first came when Villenueve beached his VM200-FE-01 in the gravel at the Melbourne hairpin in the wet, and the second when d'Ambrosio did the same at the Old Hairpin after the chequered flag had been shown.

Andretti Autosport's confidence that its problems from last week were solved proved misplaced, as Simona de Silvestro and Robin Frijns were consigned to the team's garage for the duration of the day.

There were also no runs for the Trulli team for the fifth day of testing in a row, though its troubled Motomatica JT-01 was fired up in the workshop.

Day one testing times:

1.  Sam Bird              DS Virgin Racing     1m30.451s
2.  Lucas di Grassi       Abt Audi Sport       1m30.772s
3.  Loic Duval            Dragon Racing        1m32.022s
4.  Jacques Villeneuve    Venturi              1m32.154s
5.  Jerome D'Ambrosio     Dragon Racing        1m33.419s
6.  Stephane Sarrazin     Venturi              1m33.569s
7.  Sebastien Buemi       Renault e.dams       1m33.883s
8.  Oliver Turvey         Team China Racing    1m34.203s
9.  Nick Heidfeld         Mahindra Racing      1m34.501s
10. Nathanael Berthon     Team Aguri           1m34.739s
11. Nicolas Prost         Renault e.dams       1m34.895s
12. Bruno Senna           Mahindra Racing      1m35.611s
    Vitantonio Liuzzi     Trulli                 no time
    Simona de Silvestro   Andretti Autosport     no time
    Robin Frijns          Andretti Autosport     no time