Virgin frustrated by lack of mileage

The VR-01 had to park after just 11 laps at Jerez yesterday due to a lack of spare parts after its front wing mounting broke.

It then had to sit out the morning's running today while modifications were made and brought to the circuit, then rain this afternoon limited Lucas di Grassi to only eight laps.

"Once again, despite working round the clock to remedy yesterday's problem, we not only missed the opportunity for dry running this morning, but it was so wet this afternoon that we lost a lot of running when we were finally able to get going," said Wirth.

"This was particularly annoying given the great efforts to design and manufacture new parts, R&D test them and get them out to the circuit within a 24-hour period."

Wirth is hopeful that di Grassi will be able to complete a full test programme at Jerez tomorrow.

"the harder you work, the luckier you get and with the hours we are putting in at the moment we are all hoping that our fortunes will change soon.

"The drivers remain positive, the data we are gathering is as expected and we're all keeping our heads down and just getting on with what we need to do at this early stage in our development."