Romain Grosjean will take over Nick Heidfeld’s role testing tyres for Pirelli.

The change follows Heidfeld’s move to re-join Sauber, announced on Tuesday.

Pirelli’s motorsport director Paul Hembery said the change of drivers to Grosjean was “in order to avoid favouring any individual team”:

We’d like to thank Nick for his very valuable contribution to our tyre development programme and we wish him all the best for the future.

In order to avoid favouring any individual team, we have jointly decided to release Nick from his contract and now we have chosen Romain to test for us in Monza. He’s packed a lot of experience into a short space of time, including all our GP3 tyre development, so I’m sure he’ll be able to give us some very useful feedback.

The tests here at Jerez have gone extremely well and we completed all the work that we planned over the two days. Now we move onto Monza, where our task will be to finalise the construction before we focus further on compounds.

Paul Hembery