Liuzzi delighted with first day

The Italian only managed a handful of laps on a dry track at Jerez this morning before the rain set in, but was still pleased with the new car.

"We had a quite good and interesting run today," Liuzzi said. "The most important thing to check for us was that everything was running fine and that reliability was good and this went pretty well.

"The car reacted well in every conditions and did everything that it should do on a first day of testing. The speed is not clear because we don't have a clear benchmark but I think that everything reacted well. The car showed good performance and reliability."

He formed a positive impression of the car's handling in the small amount of dry running he was able to complete.

"In the dry it showed really good balance," said Liuzzi. "In the wet, it was a little bit more nervous but we had so many different conditions during the day that it rained, stopped raining, it was wet and intermediate so it was difficult to judge.

"Overall I had quite an optimistic feeling about it and I'm looking forward to the next days to see if we can confirm what we felt today."

Liuzzi denied that Force India's decision to miss last week's Valencia test was proving costly given the poor weather forecast for the Jerez sessions.

"If you are not 100 per cent ready to do something it is better that you wait," he said. "We now have three more days here and four days next week so I don't think we will be that unlucky and go to Bahrain without testing in the dry.

"Missing Valencia was a good decision from the team because we needed to be completely ready and now we are."