By Site Staff (18/02/03)
February 20 2003

Toyota took part in the major test at Barcelona this week, alongside a good number of their competitors. This was the first chance to see how Toyota faired against it's competition, and Olivier Panis did not disappoint on the first day. The Frenchman set the fastest time of the day, recording at time only 0.5sec slower than Michael Schumacher's best time in pre-season testing. Despite the obvious pace of the new car, Panis was stangely cautious when describing his day.

"Everything went quite ok today and I am reasonably happy," he was quoted as saying after the Tuesday test had concluded. "We continued with our Australia preparations, working on different things.

"We conducted a small tyre construction test and we did some further development work on the HANS system this morning. Overall, we are heading in a good direction."

Olivier's next nearest challenger was Fernando Alonso in the Renault R23, who was 0.4sec slower.

Team mate Cristiano da Matta continued his build up to the 2003 season in the interim TF102B. Despite a reasonably sound 53 laps, the Brazilian was not happy with the days work although he stopped short of telling us why. "I cannot say I am too pleased with today's session. I have been driving the TF102B intermediary car and we have been developing some software for the race season,” he explained. “We managed just over 50 laps, but it has not been the best of days and I am hoping for a better day tomorrow."