Formula One news

Differing Friday fortunes for Toyota

The Toyota team had a day of ups and downs in Bahrain on Friday as the team's good form from the first three race weekends appeared to fade slightly, with Trulli and Glock finishing the first session fifteenth and seventeenth. Come the end of the afternoon, however, and the Toyotas were third and eighth fastest at Sakhir.

The Japanese team was one a trio to test their car in the desert during the winter break, attending with Ferrari and BMW. "During our winter tests at this circuit we had a good, consistent pace but so far today I've found the car quite hard to drive," admitted Timo Glock, who has scored points at all three races so far. "The lap times aren't bad, but I've been struggling for balance. We'll have to work overnight to sort out our direction for tomorrow and to get the car back to where it should be; if we can do that, I'm sure we can keep up our strong start to the year."

Glock, with Toyota technicians in the team garage

Although the TF109's pace may not have been quite where they would have liked, the duo did rack up a total of 116 laps between them, amounting to almost 630 kilometres (390 miles).

"We had to change some of our setup in order to suit the car to these temperatures, which are much hotter," explained Trulli, comparing conditions to those witnessed during the February test. "There is also quite a lot more sliding around than we had in the winter, but I guess that's the same for everyone; we spent the day going through our usual programme of tyre testing and setup work. We still need to find a bit more driveability in the car but it's not a bad start to the weekend."

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