Schuey top at Jerezposted in F111 | 02 | 2011

SEVEN-TIMES Formula One world champ Michael Schumacher finished the second day of the four-day test at Jerez on top of the timesheets. But anyone thinking this marks a significant turnaround in fortunes for Mercedes GP should analyse the day in more detail.

Sure, Schumacher's best time of 1min 20.352secs was 0.061s faster than the Ferrari of second-placed Felipe Massa, but the main teams — Red Bull, McLaren, even Ferrari and Force India — concentrated heavily today on assessing performance differences with tyres and fuel loads over a variety of long and short runs.

It's clear we have yet to see the true speed of any of the teams, but Mercedes will delight in grabbing the short-term headlines.

McLaren, in the hands of Jenson Button, concentrated on system checks and installation runs for much of the day in the new MP4-26. In the afternoon, the former world champ restricted himself to runs of no longer than six laps; he did though finish third-fastest.

Mark Webber had another relatively quiet day at the Red Bull office. The Aussie delivered a series of impressive long-run times without setting any headline-grabbing single laps.

We did though see a glimpse of the Red Bull RB7's potential when Webber undertook a 19-lap run largely in the 1m24s — his quickest of the day was 1:21.613s — and no other team was able to lap consistently at that pace on such a long stint.

Both Force India, in the hands of Adrian Sutil, and Renault's Vitaly Petrov, stuck to mainly short runs, yet both finished sixth and ninth respectively out of the day's 11 runners.

Scotland's Paul di Resta will get into the all-new Force India VJM 04 for the first time tomorrow morning to begin his two days of testing.

Keep up-to-date with all the latest news by following us on twitter.com/scotcars

Jim McGill