Glock to drive sole upgraded Virgin

Virgin Racing has only been able to complete urgently needed modifications to one of the two cars it will bring to the forthcoming Spanish Grand Prix, owing to the disruption caused by last month’s Icelandic volcano eruption.

Having discovered that the fuel tank on its VR-01 was not large enough to complete races at full speed, the fledgling team had intended to have two new chassis ready for the start of the European season.

But the closure of airspace caused by the volcano ash cloud kept many team personnel stranded in Shanghai for up to five additional days, foiling plans to prepare and homologate two chassis with lengthened fuel tanks.

As a result only the more experienced of Virgin’s drivers, Timo Glock, will have a fully upgraded car at his disposal in Barcelona.

“Having worked tirelessly to prepare the new car for the race, including its successful rehomologation, it is a bitter pill to swallow that we are unable to complete the second car due to the ‘volcanic delays’,” said technical director Nick Wirth.

“Running two fundamentally different specification cars at Barcelona will certainly challenge the team, but, as the reliability fixes apply to both specifications, we’ll keep our heads down and focus solely on getting both cars to the chequered flag.”

Team principal John Booth added: “What should have been a useful three-week break in the calendar, and an opportunity to ensure we are fully prepared for the European season, turned into something of a race against time thanks to the fallout from ‘The Volcano’.

“It took up to five days after the Chinese Grand Prix before the entire team were back in England, so we had to rush headlong into preparations for Spain.

“The planned modifications to the chassis were always going to be our most significant development, but they were also the tip of the iceberg in terms of what we will bring to Barcelona.

“As a new team we will be using new trucks and a new motorhome for the first time and on top of that we moved into our new race preparation facility while the team were stranded in China, so we certainly had a lot going on for us when we finally made it home.

“Nonetheless, the team have done an admirable job and we’ll be heading to Spain this week full of optimism for the next phase of our debut season.”

Glock is optimistic the team will make progress over the next few races, but admits it will be harder running two cars to different specifications in Barcelona.

“The last few weeks haven’t exactly gone according to plan thanks to the Icelandic volcano, but what this has enabled us to do is draw a line under the disappointment of Shanghai and focus on better things ahead,” said the German.

“We have taken a good hard look at the first four races and now have a very clear picture of where things have gone well for us and where we need to improve.

“It’s a shame that we couldn’t bring two new modified chassis to Spain, because we would have had two sets of data to work from, but we will work with what we have and hope that it brings the kind of results we are hoping for.”

Rookie team-mate Lucas di Grassi said: “Though I’m disappointed that I will be driving the previous specification chassis, as we didn’t have enough time to modify two cars, I hope with all the work we’ve been doing to make our race weekends go more smoothly we can have a positive European debut.”