**The new Virgin team have been forced to stop running their car following a front-wing failure at this week’s test.**The front wing fell off the car after driver Timo Glock had completed only 11 laps at Jerez in southern Spain.
Technical director Nick Wirth said the cause of the failure had been identified and that the team planned to continue work on Friday.
Glock’s best time before Virgin ended their running was more than nine seconds off the fastest lap of the day.
Glock had done three short runs when the problem occurred about an hour and a half into the second day of the four-day test.
Wirth said in a team statement: "This morning we experienced a front wing mounting problem which caused the wing to come off the car at the beginning of a run. The cause has already been identified.
"Unfortunately, we’re missing one or two spare parts which will hopefully arrive this evening, so we won’t be able to run for the rest of the day.
"In the short amount of running that we’ve achieved so far, we are very encouraged by what we’ve seen and we have gathered some vital aero data which is very much in the range of what we were predicting.
“We look forward to resuming the programme tomorrow morning.”
Virgin also managed only limited running on Wednesday, when the late arrival of new parts meant Glock did not go out on to the track until the afternoon.
He managed only five laps before the team ended his work, saying they wanted to ensure the car was ready for a full day’s testing on Thursday.
Virgin are one of four new teams to enter F1 in 2010, and are the first to get their car on to the track.
The new Lotus ran for the first time in secret at Silverstone on Tuesday, and will join the other teams for the second of the two Jerez tests, which starts on Wednesday next week.
US F1 and Campos have not run their cars.
US F1 are expected to do their pre-season running close to their base in Charlotte, North Carolina.
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There are question marks over Campos’s participation as they struggle to raise the required funding.
Sebastien Buemi’s Toro Rosso set the fastest lap of Thursday’s running before lunch, with a best time of one minute 20.026 seconds.
Jenson Button’s McLaren was second quickest on 1:20.618, followed by Nico Hulkenberg’s Williams (1:21.565), Michael Schumacher’s Mercedes (1:21.907) and the Ferrari of Fernando Alonso (1:21.928). Glock had done a 1:29.964.
It is all but impossible to judge the relative performances of the cars at this year’s winter tests because teams do not release information about how much fuel they have on board.
Alonso’s best time, for example, was set on his final lap of a run of nearly 50 laps, while others set them after much shorter runs.