RB6 Suffers Oil Leak in First Test at Jerez

Although many fans were expecting a dominant Red Bull RB6 machine during the first day of testing on the Jerez track, the events at the Spanish track didn't go quite smoothly for the Milton Keynes based team. Announced as a real title contender this year, the car broke down after approximately 3 and a half hours of testing this morning.

During the first half an hour of action on the Jerez track, Australian driver Mark Webber only managed the 9th (and last) fastest lap of the testing pack. Soon after that, the rain started pouring down on the Spanish circuit and all the lap times scored by the other testers had little to do with the cars' real performances, but rather with doing the necessary testing mileage and running different setups for team info.

At a certain point, however, the RB6 stalled on track and Mark Webber had to walk to the Red Bull garage, as his car had just suffered an oil leak. Although the Aussie later insisted that it's nothing major, but only an oil leak, the car had to be brought down for repairs in the garage. From that point on, the RB6 never returned to action on the track (now that we're more than 5 hours into Day 1).

In the meantime, Force India and Virgin Racing also debuted their single-seaters this season during the course of this morning, the latter becoming the very first new team to test their 2010 car this winter. While Force India's Vitantonio Liuzzi debuted the VJM03 during dry track conditions – setting the fastest time of 01:24.968 – Timo Glock only started testing when the track was already wet.

Consequently, he only went out to complete the installation lap 5 hours after the start of the session. The reason for the delay was that John Booth's team had some car components flied over during the course of last night, and the mechanics only managed to fit them in time during the morning running.