09/03/2011
NEWS STORY
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Sebastian Vettel has set the fastest time on the second day of the final pre-season test, the world champion - taking over from teammate Mark Webber who was quickest yesterday - posting the fastest time seen at Barcelona this year.
Enjoying a trouble-free day, Vettel completed 112 laps on his way to posting a best time over half-a-second quicker than anything his rivals could manage, with many in the pitlane confident that the RB7 has eve more in reserve.
“It was a good day and a good time," said the German, "although to be honest, it’s difficult to say where we are, as the lap times of the teams are all over the place.
"We’ve done a lot of laps again today, which is good," he added. "We have had no major problems with reliability throughout testing and the speed looks good as far as we can judge, but I think we have to wait until after Melbourne – maybe in Malaysia or China – to really see where we are.”
As well as completing a series of long and short runs with the RB7 today, the team also completed a series of pit stop practices.
“It was good to have the race team here yesterday and today, to go through pit stop practices,” said head of race engineering Ian Morgan. “Normally, we would do that once in pre-season testing but, as we lost a little time with the weather at the last test, this extra test was a good opportunity to get some more practice in ahead of Melbourne.
“As for the rest of today’s programme, it was much the same as yesterday. Seb did 112 laps without any real problems all day, which is gratifying. It’s always difficult though, to tell what your true position is until you start the season, but our pace looks good at the moment, which is promising.”
After a frustrating day yesterday, things were a lot more positive for Sebastien Buemi and Toro Rosso today, the Swiss posting the second best time of the day.
In the morning, Buemi completed a full race simulation which provided useful data in terms of tyre degradation, car performance and reliability. In the afternoon, the focus switched to running with lower fuel loads, while the team spent almost an hour practicing 'live' pit stops, a very important exercise given the increased number of pit stops likely during this year’s races. Over the course of the day Buemi used Pirelli’s Hard, Soft and Super-soft compounds.
“We can be pleased with what we achieved today," said the Swiss, "because with 120 laps, it meant we completed all the programme we had planned. Apart from the race simulation, I was also able to do a qualifying simulation. We showed a reasonable performance level and the team did a very good job in preparing the car so well. Overall, it has been a productive test. Now, we must wait and see if we can make even more progress over the next two days with Jaime driving and then we can see where we really are when we get to Melbourne."
Vitaly Petrov was an impressive third in the Lotus Renault GP R31, clocked up another 115 laps to demonstrate a clear step forward in terms of the car's overall reliability.
The team improved its understanding of the forces acting on the tyres by running instrumented wheels in the morning. The Russian got a feel for the car over long runs by simulating a race distance this afternoon, using both the hard and soft compounds of dry tyres.
"I'm pleased with what we achieved today," said Petrov, "and I was able to learn a lot about the car and the tyres. We spent the morning doing shorter runs and working on the set-up, and I was pretty happy with the car by the end of the morning. But the most important thing was to complete the race distance, which we managed this afternoon. It's the first time I've been able to do consistent long runs and really start understanding the tyres."
"It was a good day for us," added Alan Permane. "We did some data gathering in the morning, followed by set-up work and then a race distance in the afternoon. The focus of the set-up work today was looking at the rear suspension. We made various changes during the morning and found some good directions."
Despite the doom and gloom from some sections of the media, appears happy with progress despite a minor technical problem which restricted the team's tracktime.
Lewis Hamilton took over the wheel for his penultimate day of pre-season testing. His programme largely mirrored Jenson Button's day yesterday: he spent the morning running pitstop rehearsals with a full-race crew, which was cut short by a minor hydraulics leak. The morning's planned race simulation was also halted due to an exhaust failure just before lunch.
For the afternoon, Hamilton and his engineers ran through a number of set-up evaluations, conducted over shorter runs. The Englishman declared himself positive with the new components brought to the test, and the team is positive that it can end its preparations with two trouble-free days of running.
Tomorrow is a changeover day for the team, which will not be running. Testing resumes on Friday, with Button once again driving MP4-26.
It was a busy day for Ferrari; not so much in terms of the distance covered, which was more or less the average for the Italian team during these tests, but more because there were so many items on the menu.
The 150° Italia was actually kitted out with all the updates planned for the first race, in terms of its aero configuration and also sported a new exhaust configuration, which has them running along the sides of the rear part of the floor.
“First impressions are positive,” said Massa. “You can feel the effect of the new elements on the handling of the car, especially that of the exhausts. Today, we worked mainly on a back-to-back comparison of the various configurations, especially in the area of the front wing. Once again today we did a lot of kilometres, which is always a good thing.”
Tomorrow will be the Brazilian’s final day of testing prior to the Australian Grand Prix. “It’s true, I’ve got just seven more hours of track time, so we will try and make the most of them," he said. "Definitely, we will have a look at running over a long distance to get even more information relating to the behaviour of the tyres, which will certainly be one of the key factors this season.”
Paul di Resta continued Force India's programme with a simulation of a race weekend, beginning with qualifying runs in the morning and moving onto a full race simulation in the afternoon, complete with live pit stops. In total he completed 118 laps with a best time of 1:24.334.
"A reasonable day of running for us today," said the Scot, "as good reliability and clear weather meant we could get through all of our programme. In the morning I worked through the qualifying sims and in the afternoon it was onto the race runs. I've done pit stops before in practice last year but trying them in race conditions was a new experience. However they were similar in length to what I've experienced in the DTM over the past four years so I think I dealt with them OK. I'll have a break tomorrow while Adrian takes over the car to test some new aero upgrades we're running for the first time. I'll get my chance to run them on Friday and look forward to seeing how much time they will give."
"In a productive outing Paul covered over 500km," added Dominic Harlow, the team's circuit engineering director, "running our standard Saturday practice and qualifying programmes before lunch and then moving to a full race simulation in the afternoon.
"We also had our full race crew here today to give them some live pit stop practice. Reliability was good again, which allowed us to cover our primary objectives for today. Paul takes a break tomorrow and Adrian will be in the car for the full day.
At Sauber, it was Kamui Kobayashi's turn to evaluate the new parts the team had put on the C30i in preparation for the start of the season. After the sun broke through, the Japanese driver enjoyed good track conditions and covered more than 100 laps.
"It was an interesting and productive day for me, and we completed our programme as planned," said the Japanese driver. "We achieved a good mileage and learnt a lot. The set up work with the new car is different to last year's car, and it is good to get more experience with that. In the afternoon the way the track evolved was quite significant, and we struggled a bit with adapting the car and finding the right balance. But this is nothing to worry about."
"Today we ran a similar programme to yesterday to allow Kamui to evaluate the new parts on the car and give us his feedback," added technical director, James Key. "We ran various set up options to check their effectiveness, and to help us to learn more about future development directions. In the afternoon we also did a little bit of work dedicated to the tyres, and again gained some valuable data. Now we are looking forward to doing race simulations with both drivers - with Sergio tomorrow and Kamui on Friday."
Nico Rosberg was on duty for Mercedes as the team ran the first items of its upgrade package including a new exhaust package and new bodywork. The morning was spent conducting baseline runs with the new components to ensure they were performing as predicted. Results were apparently in line with the team's expectations.
The afternoon session focused on set-up and tyre management over longer runs. However, a bodywork problem brought the day's running to an earlier than planned end. Rosberg completed 100 laps, equating to 466 kms. The team has now completed 4768 kms of pre-season testing. His quickest time was set on the first lap of what proved to be his final long run of the day.
"It was nice to get the first of our upgrades on the car today, and to feel their potential," said the German. "Thanks to everyone at the team for their hard work as I think we have some impressive developments, even though we couldn't test or show the full performance today as not all of the elements are on the car and working together yet. We had glimpses that showed that the full package should be a big step. The bodywork problem cost some time at the end, however we still learned a great deal."
Jarno Trulli completed 98 laps in the Lotus T128 on his way to posting the ninth quickest time of the day. "We're pretty happy with how the day went," said the Italian, "completing 98 laps gave us a chance to work through a number of setup options and we collected a lot of useful data on the tyre degradation. They're behaving pretty much how we expected them to and the changes we made to the car gave us the results we wanted so we'll look through all the information we've gathered and see if we can take another step forward tomorrow."
"Today was a very good day for us," added Mike Gascoyne, "much more productive than a couple of the days we have had in testing so far. It is good to complete 98 laps with no real problems on the car. We concentrated on long runs, looking at tyre degradation and setup options, and the pitcrew worked through a number of pitstop practices in advance of the first race so we ran through the entire plan and everyone is happy with the work that has been done today."
It was a hugely frustrating day for Williams, the British team completing just 29 laps due to KERS issues. "It has not been a productive day for us after we had a KERS fault first thing this morning," said a dejected Sam Michael. "We removed the system and were able to get out for some limited running late afternoon."
"It hasn’t been a good day as we didn’t complete our planned programme," added Pastor Maldonado (pictured). "We unfortunately didn’t get enough running in to make too much progress."
Jerome D'Ambrosio was making good progress and had completed 42 laps when an electrical problem stopped the MVR-02 out on track late morning, causing some damage to the gearbox internals. This confined the car to the garage until mid-afternoon as the team worked to fix the fault and remedy the damage. A quick turnaround saw the car back on track with sufficient time to notch up a further 22 laps before the afternoon session closed, bringing the day's tally to 64 laps.
The team is hoping for a more productive day tomorrow to continue to put the Pirelli PZero tyres through their paces over some increasingly longer runs, working towards a race distance.
"Today has been a little frustrating as we lost valuable track time," said the Belgian. "The mechanics worked very hard to get me back out on track as quickly as possible, so with the laps that we did complete we have at least been able to gather some useful information. We still have a lot of work to do so we look forward to a trouble-free day tomorrow so we can start to move things on a little with our tyre evaluation programme."
"It was disappointing to lose track time on a day when we really wanted to start getting stuck into our race preparation work," added John Booth, "but on the positive side we did well to recover and again demonstrated our ability to turn the car around quickly when faced with an issue. Touch wood, our reliability has been relatively good so far, so it's quite pleasing that we got to the bottom of the problem so quickly and applied a good solution. We also worked through some suspension geometry changes in order to try to optimise the performance of the tyres with race stints in mind. We hope to have a clear run at the programme tomorrow in order to continue the good work we have started."
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