Hulkenberg sets the pace in Barcelona

Nico Hulkenberg set the fastest time on the second day of the Barcelona test with a best of 1m22.608s, after a mammoth 112 laps of the track in his Force India.

“We started the day with some aero work – trying some constant speed runs and collecting more data,” he said. “Then, the rest of the day was spent working on the balance of the car and trying out all four tyre compounds. I did some short runs, long runs and just got a feel for the tyre characteristics and how the car reacts to them. Once again the car has been very drivable all day and our baseline set-up has proved to be a good starting point for running all the different compounds.”

Hulkenberg was just faster than Sergio Perez in the Sauber. The Mexican completed 85 laps during the test and ended up nearly three tenths ahead of Sebastian Vettel in the Red Bull.

“We lost a bit of track time because of the exhaust problem,” said Perez, “but I am happy with how things went, we have gathered plenty of information to go through now and I believe we are working in the right direction.”

The World Champion was doing race preparation work and so did a 104 laps in the course of the day, but it was not without problems.

The team’s head of race engineering Ian Morgan explained that it was so cold on the morning that the team had problems with pit stop practice, “simply because the equipment was freezing up as we tried to use it”. Vettel did have a problem later in the morning but the team declined to talk about it.

“We had a little bit of a problem, it was small,” said Vettel. “With testing you stop whenever there’s a issue, take a look and see what’s what and that always takes up a bit of time. But nevertheless, in the afternoon I was quite happy. We got a lot of laps done, more than 100, so we got through most of the programme.”

Fernando Alonso was just a couple of tenths slower than Vettel, and did 87 laps. The team said that he was doing “development and data acquisition”, which did not tell anyone a lot.

Daniel Ricciardo did only 49 laps in the Toro Rosso, but managed a best of 1m23.639s.

“The afternoon did not go to plan,” the Australian said, “but the morning was positive and we did all the runs we had planned for the first part of the day.”

The team did not give full details of the problems, but said that one of them was a driveshaft.

Ricciardo’s time was slightly faster than Lewis Hamilton’s McLaren. Lewis did 121 laps and set a time of 1m23.806s. The focus for the morning was on data gathering and set-up evaluation before the team carried out a race-distance simulation in the afternoon.

“To have completed more than 1000km in the past two days is incredibly encouraging – the whole team should feel proud,” said Hamilton. “The car behaves really well in the high-speed corners – I think the baseline of our car is higher than it was last year – and it’s better overall at high-speed. We don’t know the fuel-loads of the other cars, so it’s still hard to determine the pecking order. We didn’t bring any upgrades here, but our understanding of the car has developed since the test in Jerez. We’re learning more about how the tyres work, how the temperatures behave and how to balance the car using set-up. It’s been an extremely productive few days.”

Nico Rosberg was next in the new Mercedes and completed 82 laps for a best time of 1m24.555s.

“It was good to get into proper testing today,” he said. “Early in the morning, it was a bit too cold on the track to collect some decent information, however later we were able to get into our planned work. In the afternoon session, unfortunately we had a transmission oil leak which meant that I wasn’t able to complete any further running. That doesn’t affect my positive feelings about our test programme, and things like that can happen in the early stages of running a new car.”

Rosberg was two-tenths ahead of Williams test driver Valtteri Bottas, who completed 117 laps with a best of 1m25.738s.

“I really enjoyed today,” the Finn said. “The FW34 again showed good reliability, as we completed 117 laps while doing some interesting tests with the car set-up.”

Vitaly Petrov has his first runs withe the Caterham team and clocked 69 laps, as he got used to the car. His best was a 1m26.605s,

“We got through most of what we had planned,” said the Russian. “This morning we had a couple of issues with the seating position and the brakes, but you expect that from a new car and they were little things that we were able to fix quickly. In the afternoon we put in a few more long runs and that’ll give us a lot of data to work on tonight and I think tomorrow it will be more of the same. Physically I feel really good. It’s obviously been a while since I’ve been in a car, but I’ve kept up my fitness levels and I enjoyed myself on track, so it’s a good first day back. One thing I have noticed is that this car behaves a little differently from my previous experience and I think I may have to adjust my driving style to get the best out of it – I’ve been quite aggressive before, but I think this car responds better to smoother inputs, so that’s something I can work on, and work with the engineers on.”

Charles Pic continued to bash around in the old Marussia Virgin, covering 109 laps with a best of 1m27.343s.