Virgin car to make early debut

UPDATE There is a rumor circulating that the Virgin team will badge their Cosworth power plant with a new Russian sports car brand; Marussia, who was announced as one of the team sponsors recently. This one seems to make sense, but is currently being denied. So we will be looking for this when they debut the car.

01/13/10 Virgin Racing appear poised to make their track debut at the second official pre-season test in Jerez next month.

Technical director Nick Wirth insists the team are currently ahead of schedule as they were initially not expecting to test until the second half of February, with further tests scheduled again in Jerez and then Barcelona.

But Wirth believes the car will now be fired up later this month, before joining the majority of the other marques in southern Spain for the second test from February 10-13.

"The fire-up is planned for Friday the 29th (of January), although I think it will probably be earlier," Wirth told Autosport.

"We'll shake the car down in the week of the first of February. That was always the plan.

"To be honest, we were also planning to miss the first Jerez test, but as we got into August and September we thought we had a chance to bring it forward and do as much testing as possible.

"So we plan to shake it down in the UK, possibly on the third but more likely on the fourth and fifth (of February), and then ship the thing out and start running on the 10th of February at Jerez." Sporting Life