Virgin Racing Confirms Only One Updated VR-01 in Spain

As initially projected, Virgin Racing will align only one updated challenger for this weekend's Spanish Grand Prix, due to the delays in development caused by the volcanic ash situation following the Chinese Grand Prix. As the team was unable to send both cars back to the UK for further developments immediately after the race at Shanghai, the guys at Wirth Research only managed to get one VR-01 ready for Barcelona.

Obviously, the newly developed VR-01 will be raced by leading driver Timo Glock, while rookie Lucas di Grassi will have to tackle one more race with the old, low-fueled car. Nevertheless, the team's technical director Nick Wirth insisted the target for both drivers is still to finish the race, as reliability issues are yet to be addressed even with the new updates.

“Having worked tirelessly to prepare the new car for the race, including its successful rehomologation, it is a bitter pill to swallow that we are unable to complete the second car due to the 'volcanic delays',” said Wirth in a preview for the Spanish Grand Prix.

“Running two fundamentally different specification cars at Barcelona will certainly challenge the team, but as the reliability fixes apply to both specifications, we'll keep our heads down and focus solely on getting both cars to the chequered flag,” added the team's technical director.

Although happy he'll get to drive a new chassis VR-01 in Spain, Glock admitted his disappointment over not getting to see two updated Virgin cars in Catalunya. That would make the development of the new chassis car harder that expected, as the engineers will have less data to work with in the upcoming few weeks.

“Though I'm disappointed that I will be driving the previous specification chassis, as we didn't have enough time to modify two cars, I hope with all the work we've been doing to make our race weekends go more smoothly we can have a positive European debut,” added the British official.