Adrian’s programme followed on from Tonio’s schedule of the previous two days, with systems checks, long runs and set-up evaluation. The heavy rain and frequent red flags compromised some of the schedule, however Adrian completed 48 laps before an electrical fault halted him on track some 90 minutes before the end of the session.

Adrian Sutil: This morning it was nice to have some dry running. The car is good and I think it’s a positive place to start. I’m very confident on the general speed of the car. Unfortunately the rain came in quite early and then it was really waiting for reasonable conditions to go out. We had a problem in the afternoon that caused us to miss a bit of track time, but considering it was so wet it would have been very difficult to get a lot of running in anyway. I’m pleased to at least have had some dry running and some more time in the car and am looking forward to getting started again tomorrow.

Dominic Harlow, chief race engineer: Today’s programme attempted to condense dry weather testing into the start of the day, and following the expected onset of rain at mid-morning we moved to aerodynamic testing. Some further new components were introduced successfully and the intermediate and then wet conditions allowed Adrian to look at tyre options for these conditions. We had an issue that resulted in some downtime in the afternoon, but with the weather worsening it didn’t cost us much track time and that is what testing with a new car is about.

Day 3 best laptimes:

P	Driver	Team	Time	Difference	Laps
1	J.Alguersuari	Toro Rosso	1.19.919	—	76
2	P.De La Rosa	Sauber	1.20.738	+0.817	58
3	A.Sutil	Force India	1.21.428	+1.509	48
4	F.Massa	Ferrari	1.21.603	+1.684	72
5	S.Vettel	Red Bull	1.21.783	+1.864	59
6	V.Petrov	Renault	1.22.000	+2.081	68
7	N.Rosberg	Mercedes	1.22.820	+2.901	53
8	R.Barrichello	Williams	1.23.217	+3.298	120
9	L.Hamilton	McLaren	1.23.985	+4.066	68
10	L.Di Grassi	Virgin	1.37.107	+17.188	8