By role
September 18 2003

Frank Montagny has been testing heavily at Barcelona on Tuesday and Wednesday as the Renault team finished their testing days of the Heathrow Agreement. The Renault F1 team was one of the teams that signed the Heathrow Agreement at the beginning of the season that gave them 2 extra hours of free testing at each track but limited their testing days to 10 of multiple car testing or 20 of single car testing.

Renault has been using wisely those 2 extra hours as well as the rest of the testing days in ordeer to improve the R23B. The car has performed better than expected achieving 4 podiums and a win on the hands of Fernando Alonso and Jarno Trulli.

Each test has therefore become quite important and Renault has been the only team of the 4 that signed the agreement to haver run 3 cars in each one of the 2 hours sessions at races.

Also on non racing weekends testing Renault has been doing thousands of kilometers mainly with test driver Allan mcNish at the wheel in order to improve the performance of their car.

The final day of not racing testing came yesterday when Frank Montagny did 123 laps (581 km) with the R23B.

Montagny set a best time of 1.17.392 one second away of the best time of the day set by David Coulthard.

Mike Gascoyne, Technical Director of Renault F1, was very pleased on the progress done by Montagny and on the improvements tested at Barcelona:

"An effective second day for Franck," said Mike Gascoyne. "He spent most of the day testing tyres for Suzuka, then moved on to some chassis work. His lap-times were very consistent, and improved throughout the day. Overall, it was a day where he continued to confirm his potential, and a fitting end to a very effective year’s testing."

Some F1 insiders have mentioned that Franck Montagny could become Renault F1 official test driver for 2004 what will free Allan McNish from the team.