Wurz Fastest at Silverstone Test - Day One

Renault are planning to introduce a revamp of their car at the Brazilian Grand Prix, as Alonso bids to capture the World Championship, and with Silverstone not being one of the team's strongest tracks the performance today must have left them encouraged.

Ricardo Zonta was third fastest for Toyota, as he focused on developments to this year's TF105. He brought the red flags out in the afternoon when his car stopped while exiting the pits. Fellow Toyota test driver Olivier Panis was handed work with the revised TF105B but was left struggling for pace as he ended the day more than three seconds adrift of Wurz.

The main focus for onlookers was Anthony Davidson's performance in the Jordan. The BAR test driver did not get out on the track in anger until just before 1:00pm, after suffering an engine failure following his installation lap in the morning.

Despite stalling on another occasion when he left the pits, the Briton managed to complete 58 laps in his bid to impress the team's bosses. He had no teammate to provide a time comparison against, but he was just over a second slower than Red Bull Racing's Christian Klien.

The day was relatively incident-free, although there were a lot of complaints in the morning about the state of the track following the Silverstone 24 Hours race at the weekend.

Apart from Zonta and Davidson's session stopping moments, Renault's Heikki Kovalainen stopped twice with mechanical problems, which included one engine failure, while Klien also stopped early in the afternoon.

The most spectacular moment of the day, however, was in the morning when Pedro de la Rosa returned to the pits with a fiery Mercedes-Benz V8 engine - which is believed to have been triggered by an overheated exhaust.

Today's times:

Pos  Driver      Team                   Time      Laps
 1.  Wurz        McLaren-Mercedes  (M)  1:17.101   67
 2.  Alonso      Renault           (M)  1:17.112  111
 3.  Zonta       Toyota            (M)  1:18.140   82
 4.  Kovalainen  Renault           (M)  1:18.701   67
 5.  Liuzzi      Red Bull-Cosworth (M)  1:18.871   81
 6.  Klien       Red Bull-Cosworth (M)  1:19.911   61
 7.  Davidson    Jordan-Toyota     (B)  1:21.011   58
 8.  Panis       Toyota            (M)  1:21.600   33
 9.  De la Rosa  McLaren-Mercedes  (M)  1:24.481   37

All timing unofficial