Pentus tops low downforce test

Estonian Sten Pentus and his Fortec Motorsport crew demonstrated a rapid grasp of the new rules, which require the bi-plane rear-wing to be fitted two slots below the top mounting position and the removal of the car's side-skirts.

Pentus used two sets of tyres to record the fastest time of 1m42.390s, some 1.2s faster than yesterday's best lap set by Draco's Nathanael Berthon. French rookie Berthon was the best of the rest this morning, but a distant 0.503s off the top of the timesheet.

Quickest on Friday morning, SG Formula's Jean-Eric Vergne traded the fastest time with Berthon over the opening 50 minutes of today's three and half hour session. The Red Bull Junior driver ended the session in third, 0.016s ahead of Carlin's Formula Renault 3.5 returnee Mikhail Aleshin.

Walter Grubmuller was the only other driver to break into the 1m42s, while Czech driver Filip Salaquarda recovered from gear selector trouble, which prevented him from any running over the opening two hours, to complete the top six.

Renault-Sport's Emmanuel Esnault was pleased with the performance of the LAC.

"It's exactly what we wanted to see," said Esnault. "Pentus managed the situation very well. During the Sunday races the teams can run whatever set-ups they like, so now that this looks quicker it's possible that on the Sunday race here no one will use high downforce.

"The difference will vary from track to track, here the long straight was always going to be favourable to the low downforce setting - at Brno it could be a different story. The teams will have to watch the tyre wear over the race, though, as the cars are sliding around more."