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Liuzzi fourth on final day of testing

February 21, 2010 16:01 IST

Vitantonio Liuzzi rounded off Force India's four-day testing with the fourth fastest time of the day and 80 smooth laps of the Circuit de Jerez in Jerez (Spain).

The Italian covered 80 laps of the Spanish track with a programme that included work on set-up and understanding the car's behaviour with the heavier fuel loads necessitated by the race refuelling ban this year.

His fastest lap of 1:19.650 was the fourth quickest of the day, behind McLaren's Jenson Button (1:18.871), Renault's Robert Kubica (1:19.114) and BMW Sauber's Kamui Kobayashi (1:19.188).

"It was a productive day for us," a satisfied Liuzzi said.

"We covered 80 laps without any issues and got through our programme of test items for this week. Everything went pretty well - we worked on understanding the car's performance with different fuel loads and ran through some set-up changes and the car is responding well."

"We still need to work on the tyres over the longer runs and will continue this at the next test in Barcelona. Overall I think we can be very satisfied with how this test has gone and can look forward to another good test next week," said the Italian.

Chief race engineer Dominic Harlow also saw no reason to complain.

"A good day to finish the eight days of testing in Jerez. Tonio completed a broad programme of set-up tests and we are satisfied with what was learned," Harlow said.

"We've made good progress this week, having tidied up some reliability issues, and developed our set-up options with the VJM03. The team has begun its race preparation in earnest and we will head to Barcelona to continue this work over the final test before the first race of 2010," he added.

The team's testing programme will now move to Barcelona from February 25 to 28. Liuzzi will drive for the first two days with Adrian Sutil taking over for the final two days.

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