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Mechanical Failure for BMW Sauber in Bahrain

Ferrari and BMW Sauber have both experienced problems during the 3rd day of this week's testing at the Sakhir circuit. During the morning session, Felipe Massa's Ferrari had to make a significant visit to the pits due to some gearbox problems after only 4 laps on track. Massa's morning session was partially compromised, as the Brazilian only managed to run half the mileage of fellow “testers” Nick Heidfeld and Timo Glock.

Heidfeld, however, experienced some problems of his own with the BMW Sauber F1.09 – for the second day running – as the car stopped a couple of times on the Sakhir track due to mechanical issues.

“Obviously that cost us some track time. But despite this I managed to run for 444 kilometres and we made good progress with the development of the car. We are still learning the car and have already identified a few areas where we can make improvements,” said Heidfeld after the testing session.

Again, Toyota was the only of the three teams present at Bahrain this week not to have had any on-track problems with their 2009 challenger. Not only that, but German driver Timo Glock also recorded the fastest time of the day, being clocked at 1:32.492. As the TF109 did not create any problems to the mechanics, Glock was also able to run the most mileage on Wednesday, 132.

“We didn't have any major problems and we again made it through a lot of work. We concentrated on set-up and went through our programme smoothly,” said Glock at the end of the day. He also pointed that the strong wind today has affected the testing session to some extent, but was happy with the final outcome of the meeting.

“It has been a bit tricky to drive today because there was a lot of wind, which was also blowing from a different direction to yesterday when Jarno was driving. But in the end I'm happy that we did so much work and it's positive that we found some useful directions to work with,” added the German.

Timing sheet of the Wednesday testing at Sakhir:

1.Timo Glock (Toyota) 1:32.492 (132 laps)
2.Felipe Massa (Ferrari) 1:32.917 (105 laps)
3.Nick Heidfeld (BMW-Sauber) 1:32.993 (82 laps)
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