The first day of the second week of testing is completed. We had a day with a couple of spins, few red flags and we ended with Kubica as fastest today. Hamilton did the most rounds today. But what did the drivers had to say about this? We collected their quotes.
Lewis Hamilton
It’s been a good session and a good start to the second week of testing here in Barcelona. We’ve just got our heads down, trying to continue increasing our mileage and our understanding of this car – through the subtle changes with car set-up, the tires and the aerodynamic package. A fairly standard day, but it was a bit windier out there and it felt like the track had less grip – so there was some sliding around. The car didn’t quite feel as good as the first week, but I’m sure that will change as the test progresses and the track conditions improve.
Valtteri Bottas
Very good mileage today, 90 laps. For half a day in the car, that’s really good. We got some good set-up tests done and focused on long-running. I think we picked up lots of learning points, although it was a bit tricky this afternoon with gusty wind, which made it sometimes more difficult to understand the set-up changes in detail. But I am sure we’ll analyze everything overnight and find the learnings from it. Everything ran smoothly, except a slightly late start to the day with some big changes over lunchtime. But still, we got some good running in and it’s good to be back in the car again.
Lance Stroll
Unfortunately, we had a few problems with the car today, which resulted in us not getting the full program done this morning. It’s a little frustrating, as obviously you want as much track time as you can get before the first race – but it’s better we find and fix these issues now than have them hit us when we get to Melbourne. Overall, the car has felt pretty good since we first hit the track last week, so I’m looking forward to getting back to it tomorrow and hoping for a smoother day.
Sergio Perez
Every time you jump into a new car, you’re learning new things. We still have a lot to work through to keep learning as much as we can before the first race, and there are a lot of areas we can still improve at this stage, as always in testing. But overall, it was another really solid day – even if this afternoon was a little bit tricky with the wind changing a lot from the beginning to the end of the session. I’ve got one more day in the car on Friday, so I’m looking forward to that and hoping we can extract the maximum from our package to end the test on a strong note before we head to Melbourne.
Pierre Gasly
We had a little issue this morning which compromised our session. For sure it wasn’t ideal as we had planned more laps and we lost some mileage, but these things happen, and we recovered as much as we could in the final hour. It was an intense end to the session as we explored different setup directions for the car with the little time we had. There were a couple of interesting things that Daniil continued working on this afternoon. We’ll try to maximize every opportunity we have left on the track to learn more about the car, I feel there’s a lot more to come, but everyone has the same amount of track time so we need to be as efficient as possible.
Daniil Kvyat
I think it was a productive half-day of testing for me. When it’s a new car you always get interesting results, so I was able to understand it better every run I did. We continued with more setup changes you wouldn’t normally have time to try in free practice, to be able to see how the car reacts. We’re not looking for pure performance yet, we’re looking to fine-tune the balance and see how the changes behave in different corners; I think we can be happy with all of the data we gathered. We needed to tick as many boxes as possible today, especially now that testing is quite limited this year and I’ve only got one day in the car left.
Romain Grosjean
There was a big agenda for the day, including trying different types of tires and different aero parts. That’s always fun trying to find the right direction for the future. I think we’ve accomplished a lot. We haven’t looked at going fast, we’ve been working more to improve our understanding of the car and get different parts on and see what they do. I think we’ve accomplished a lot.
Alexander Albon
We had a small issue with the suspension and lost a bit of time so this morning was a little frustrating – but we did so many laps last week we’re still on a good footing and haven’t really fallen behind our plan. Even though we didn’t get as many laps as expected, the car was feeling pretty good and already an improvement on how it was last week. Obviously, this week there will be more of a focus on performance, and we’ve taken some steps in the right direction. We’re trying to get the car into the best window. It’s already in a good place but there are little pieces of the puzzle we’re trying to fit together throughout the test, getting us ready for Melbourne.
Max Verstappen
Today I tried the new Pirelli tyre compound, but overall we were trying lots of things, learning how the car reacts under various circumstances, so when we reach Australia, we’ll know what to expect. We won’t know how good we are until we get to Melbourne because testing isn’t about setting lap times but trying new and different things. I stopped on track just before the end of the session but we’re not concerned and overall it was a positive day. We have a lot of grip but so do the other cars so let’s see what happens when we go racing.
Carlos Sainz
Today we focused our morning on trying to understand some new aero parts for the car. The program was very intense and changing the parts around meant we didn’t get to do as many laps as last week, but we completed the run plan as intended. All the back-to-back testing was important and all the data gathered is going to be very useful to understand the car. All in all, a good day.
Lando Norris
A good day, we did a lot of shorter aero runs to get a better understanding of the balance of the car. We changed the car a bit since last week in the areas we felt we had to improve on, and the set-up was also slightly different. Because of that, we still needed to do a few more aero runs. It was another day of trying to learn more about the car, get a good feeling as a driver, and get some laps on the board.
This article will be updated once more quotes come in
