Paul di Resta and JR Hildebrand continued their progress in the Force India Formula One Team’s young driver test at Jerez circuit, southern Spain. Paul was in the car first this morning and after completing installation runs and some initial set up work, went on to run some 2010 development items and conduct some fuel system evaluation. The 23-year-old posted the second quickest time of the morning, 1:19.411, and 58 laps.

JR took over for the afternoon session and conducted a similar programme of basic set up and evaluation of the VJM02 with a simulated 2010 fuel tank load. With colder conditions and light rain in the early part of the afternoon the 21-year-old American Indy Lights champion completed 49 laps with a best of 1:20.517.

JR will continue Thursday  morning, with Paul taking over in the afternoon.

Paul di Resta

Yesterday the programme was to get comfortable in the car and to see how everything worked. I was able to get to a reasonable level quite quickly after one run so I felt prepared and had progressed enough for the team to be able to use me to test some development items, which will of course help them in 2010. We had quite a structured programme this morning of running back to back set-up for 2009 and 2010 and both long and short runs, but it went pretty well. I’m up to speed now and I understand what I can do to improve my own performance. Equally each run we are doing something different so I need to keep learning and giving feedback to the team