By Karl King
February 1 2008

Giancarlo Fisichella was in action for Force India in Barcelona on a dry but overcast day at the Spanish track. Fisi completed 100 laps with no major problems, setting the fourth fastest time of the day focussing on improving set up and reliability. Fisico's fastest time, a 1m23.015 was less than one second from the pace-setting time of Lewis Hamilton, Giancarlo very nearly breaking into the 1m22s

Giancarlo's lap was, in fact, almost 8 tenths of a second faster than Adrian Sutil's qualifying lap at the track back in April, showing the marked improvement of the team.

Fisichella's time was only 0.032s slower than the fastest BMW of Kubica in third, Alonso only a shade off being a tenth faster than the Pole.

The day had a few red flags - especially after Kazuki Nakajima had a large accident in his Williams prompting the team to bring in Nico Rosberg for the day over concerns of the safety of their FW30s.

Fisi said, 'It was a good day today and I think we made a lot of progress.

'We did some runs to work on set-up and looked at some parts to improve reliability and had no big problems over the day.

'I felt more comfortable in the car too - we are definitely going in the right direction and the times were pretty good.

'I'm very happy as we're showing the potential we have now.'

More than two tenths slower than Fisichella was BMW's Heidfeld in fifth, followed by Paffett, Piquet, Vettel, Rosberg, Coulthard, Webber (sporting a rather peculiar looking engine cover), Bourdais, Nakajima, Barrichello and finally Wurz, who was more than 4 and a half seconds off the leading pace in his RA108.

Mike Gascoyne, chief technical officer was also pleased with the day's running, 'A very productive day of testing that was only spoilt by the numerous red flag periods we experienced.

'The car ran reliably with no real problems and we completed a full programme of set-up and reliability work.

'As you can see, we have made good progress with Giancarlo and can count this as a very pleasing day.

'We now have to maintain this with Tonio and Adrian over the next two days.'