BLOOMINGTON, Minn. — Jarno Trulli’s Toyota will sit on the pole at the season opening Australian Grand Prix on March 16 alongside David Coulthard’s Red Bull Renault. The next two rows of the grid will consist of Nico Rosberg’s Williams Toyota, Heikki Kovalainen’s McLaren Mercedes, Mark Webber’s Red Bull and Nelson Piquet’s Renault.
Well, probably not, but those were the fastest six driver/car combos on the final day of the final multi-team preseason test prior to the race in Melbourne.
Still, it’s been a while since Trulli has had a smile this wide. True, his Toyota TF108 was set up for a one lap wonder, but the team has definitely made a major improvement to the car in recent weeks.
“We have finally found a new direction,” Trulli said. “We are very close to being at the top if you forget about Ferrari and McLaren, because they are really very strong. But we are very close to the rest.”
Lewis Hamilton’s McLaren was quickest on the first two days of the test attended by all the teams except Super Aguri.
Gearbox problems and red flags on the final day slowed Kimi Raikkonen’s Ferrari and left the Finn a bit perturbed as he was only ninth fastest. Still, the Ferraris looked competitive with Raikkonen second on day one and third on day two behind the McLarens.

• Force India ran its new VJM01 for the first time at the Barcelona test. It’s essentially last year’s Spyker monocoque with new bodywork and updated to meet the 2008 rules.
“We were running 60 percent of the aero package we will use in Australia, and it seemed to go well,” Tech Chief Mike Gascoyne said.

• Although Super Aguri skipped the final two pre-season tests of the season, the team insists it will be in Melbourne for the Australian Grand Prix. The team is continuing to negotiate with several investors to help it out of its financial woes.

• Team Williams declined a lucrative offer from McLaren to buy out Nico Rosberg’s contract. With Fernando Alonso destined to leave McLaren, the team was looking for a suitable replacement and wanted the talented Rosberg.
But Frank Williams and Patrick Head had no intention of letting Rosberg go.
“It was never a thought we entertained,” Williams said at a media lunch. “We had an offer from you-know-who, of majestic proportions, but it was never ever discussed. Why would we give away the crown jewels? Why bother improving the car by one second if we then give away half a second with the driver.”
Rosberg is signed up through 2009.

• Michael Schumacher set the third fastest time behind Lewis Hamilton and Kimi Raikkonen during the one day he tested the new Ferrari at Barcelona last week. It was Schumi’s first run in the F2008, and he worked on reliability and set-up rather than lap times. Overall he was impressed: “The progress is very clear. I feel we are ready and prepared to fight for victory.”

• Williams has added apparel company All Saints and jewelry company mydiamonds.com to its sponsorship roster. Both are part of Baugur, which has been rumored to be trying to buy shares in the team. It’s also rumored that Baugur was lined up to sponsor Prodrive’s F-1 entry that failed to materialize.

• McLaren is not on the verge of firing team boss Ron Dennis as some uninformed media outlets said last week. Firstly, Dennis is a shareholder not an employee, so he can’t just be fired. Secondly, even though he is now a minority shareholder, Dennis, 61, remains the boss and retains the full support of the other shareholders.
“Ron is fully supported by all our shareholders, all our managers and all who work for our team’s company,” McLaren’s COO Martin Whitmarsh told The Guardian newspaper. “He continues to fulfill the role of chairman of the McLaren Group, chief executive of the McLaren Group, and team principal of the F-1 operation. It therefore follows that it is for Ron to decide when and if to step down, step away, step back or whatever.”

• Paul Frere has died at the age of 91. An automotive journalist and a racer, he won several non-championship F-1 races as well as the 1960 Le Mans 24 Hours. Frere competed in 11 Grand Prix races in the 1950s with his best finish being a second in his home event in Belgium.

• While some teams planned only short shakedown runs before shipping their cars to Melbourne, if even that, Honda scheduled one final three-day private test session at Jerez this week. “Our main aero updates and some new mechanical developments will arrive for the Jerez test,” Jenson Button said. “We have a great deal to do there to ensure that we are in a position to be competitive for Melbourne. We have been doing a lot of work to overcome our handling issues but the pace and the lap times are not there yet.”