Fears that air travel chaos caused by the volcanic ash cloud could affect Formula 1 teams' preparations for the Spanish Grand Prix have been allayed.
Lifting of air restrictions on Tuesday allowed teams to begin flying equipment and personnel to Europe from Shanghai, following Sunday's Chinese Grand Prix.
"We're confident it won't cause us any major issues," said Red Bull team boss Christian Horner on the team's website.
The next race at Barcelona's Circuit de Cataluyna takes place on 9 May.
"Thankfully, the way the calendar is with the extra week between the Chinese and Spanish Grand Prix, it has a very limited impact," added Horner.
"There's still over a week to turn the cars around and a lot of the components for the next race are produced here in the factory.
 | We will go through our normal proceedures to unpack all the freight that's arrived from China, and will then turn our attention to applying the Barcelona update package to both cars Lotus F1 chief technical officer Mike Gascoyne |
"The majority of the team stuck together. We managed to get them on a direct flight today [Thursday], which arrives in the UK later this afternoon.
"The cars and freight will also arrive back today, probably beating the team home by an hour or two."
It is a similar situation for the Renault team, who have their cars back in the UK and are hopeful that team personnel will all arrive home by Saturday.
"The cars are now back and there are people here who can strip them and have them in a condition that when the race team are back in they are able to start building them back up," a Renault spokesman told BBC Sport.
Sauber were also confident that preparations for Barcelona would be unaffected by the travel problems, with a spokesman telling GPUpdate.net: "There will be no negative effects on the preparation for the next race.
"We have had people coming back from Shanghai every day since Tuesday.
"One group will follow today, another group tomorrow and the last five people are planned for the weekend. The freight will arrive in Munich tomorrow morning."
| Jake Humphrey's blog Jake Humphrey |
The start of the European season in Spain marks a significant point in the championship, with several teams working on improvements to their cars ahead of the race.
Lotus F1, whose team principal Tony Fernandes flew 55 personnel to Kuala Lumpur on Monday on one of his own Air Asia planes before they returned to the UK on Wednesday, are confident their planned alterations will be unaffected.
"We've faced minimal disruption to our travel plans, and have minimised the impact it could have had on our ability to work to our pre-Barcelona timetable," said chief technical officer Mike Gascoyne.
"We will go through our normal proceedures to unpack all the freight that's arrived from China, and will then turn our attention to applying the Barcelona update package to both cars."
Some members of the Force India team are still in Shanghai, waiting for a flight out but expect to leave on Friday.
"Our drivers got out on Tuesday, so they are sorted. (British test driver) Paul (Di Resta) is racing in the DTM (in Germany this weekend) so it was a bit more critical for him to get back," a team spokeswoman told Reuters.
"The majority of the team are flying back on a charter expected to be leaving at some point tomorrow."
