28/02/2017
NEWS STORY
Esteban Ocon got his first taste of 2017 machinery as he stepped inside the cockpit of the VJM10 for the second day of testing in Barcelona.
Esteban Ocon: "A very enjoyable first day in the VJM10. It's very early days, of course, but the initial feelings are positive and we found a good direction for setting up the car. The only issue was an oil leak just before lunch, but it didn't cost us much track time and I'm satisfied with the number of laps we covered. I hope we will make similar progress tomorrow and the day after. This was my first experience of the new generation cars and I have to say they are proper beasts: the high-speed corners are very impressive and there are big gains in the low-speed corners so it's a good step forward."
Tom McCullough, Chief Race Engineer: "It was a much smoother day than yesterday with good reliability allowing us to cover 86 laps with Esteban. We finished off the systems checks this morning as Esteban became comfortable with the new car and then moved straight into the aero programme, which we had started yesterday with Sergio. Esteban's feedback led us in a good direction with rebalancing the car and he also ran on a variety of tyre compounds including supersoft, soft and medium. I'm pleased we managed to exceed our target lap count and accrued so much data because the learning curve is so steep in these early days. We will continue the programme tomorrow with Alfonso Celis in the VJM10."