Maldonado leads the way

Pastor Maldonado led the way on the third day of Barcelona testing, which seemed a rather incongruous result given the lap times from Williams up to now. However, it did underline that one cannot really read anything into the lap times until we get to Melbourne. Maldonado completed 106 laps of the track and set a best of 1m22.391s. The team has thus far completed 944 km of running in the course of this test, which is a long way short of McLaren’s total of 1,600km in three days. Other teams who have been turning large numbers of laps are Force India, with 1,350, Red Bull Racing with 1,300 and both Sauber and Ferrari, with around 1,150 apiece. The under-performers in terms of mileage have been Mercedes (830km), Scuderia Toro Rosso (950km) and Caterham (800km). Lotus F1 Team has, of course, dropped down the lists as a result of pulling out on the first day of the test.

Maldonado downplayed the result.

“It was a good day today, as we completed all of our planned programme with no issues,” he said. “We have put more mileage on the car which is great for everyone here and back at the factory as we now have a lot more data to analyse. The car is progressing well and I feel everything is going in the right direction.”

Second fastest on Thursday was Michael Schumacher, with a best lap of 1m23.384s after 127 laps of running.

“I’m very happy with the race simulation that we ran this afternoon,” he said. “It confirmed what we have seen from the first tests with our new car, and that we don’t seem to have any big issues with reliability. The small things from the last two days I would rate as typical testing issues. So from my side, I am happy with our first full testing session, and we have definitely improved our game which is what we wanted to achieve. To what extent, we can only see later.”

Kamui Kobayashi was next for Sauber with a 1m23.582s after 99 laps.

“It was my first day of driving the new car here in Barcelona,” he said, “and it was a good one. We had no noteworthy problems all day and went through a lot of test items. I can feel we have made some progress compared to the test in Jerez.”

Jenson Button completed 114 laps for a best time of 1m23.918s.

“We’ve done a lot of reliability work over the past three days – more than 100 laps on each day,” he said. “Most of that has been longer runs, getting used to the feeling of the car over a long-run and set-up work for the longer runs. We’ve also been really working hard to understand this year’s Pirelli tyres and getting the car to work efficiently around them. That’s a key part of the programme this winter. There are a lot of cars out there that look competitive: so we’ll keep pushing.”

Jean-Eric Vergne did 78 laps for a best of 1m24.433s for Toro Rosso.

“We got through a lot of work today, including some aero evaluation and different set-ups,” said The Frenchman. “We ran all day long on the Medium tyres, which gives us a good baseline to analyse the data. We are learning more about our new car with every lap and it has performed well on this Barcelona track which is always a true test of how a car is performing. Towards the end of the day, I had my first experience of proper Formula 1 pit stops. It was a scary feeling at the beginning, coming in at 100 km/h and seeing so many people. At first, I was worried about hitting someone, but by the end I had got used to it. It’s an exciting experience!”

Mark Webber was next for Red Bull, completing more race work and 96 laps, with a best lap of 1m24.771s, but time was lost because of further trouble with the gearbox.

“It wasn’t a bad day at all,” said the Australian. “Not the smoothest of morning’s and we didn’t get too many laps done there, but in the afternoon the race simulation went OK. We’re still learning plenty. It would have been nice to have done a few more laps, but I think everyone always wants to get 20 or 30 more and, even with the problem this morning, there were loads of positives to look at.”

Felipe Massa was back in the Ferrari and did 84 laps, setting a best of 1m24.771s, exactly the same time as Webber.

The team said very little, suggesting that Massa “continued with the work of car development and data acquisition relating to the behaviour of the F2012, which team-mate Fernando Alonso had begun a couple of days ago. The Brazilian driver got through all the key elements of the planned programme. At the end of the session, Felipe carried out a fuel scavenge test and stopped at the end of the pit lane.”

Force India was out of the spotlight, with Paul Di Resta setting a 1m25.646s after 83 laps

“We lost some time with a bodywork issue late in the morning,” said Jakob Andreasen, the team’s chief engineer, “but the afternoon proved more productive and we made up for the time we lost with a revised programme. We ran with the hard and medium compound tyres and completed the short and long runs we had planned, whilst also making numerous changes to the mechanical and aero balance of the car. It was an excellent effort.”

Timo Glock appeared in the 2011 Marussia, doing 108 laps and setting a best of 1m26.173s, while Vitaly Petrov did 70 laps in the Caterham with a best of 1m26.448s.

“That was a bit of a difficult day where we struggled to give Vitaly the sort of setup he wants,” said Steve Nielsen, the team’s Sporting Director. “He did a good job today to drive around a couple of basic issues we knew we would encounter, but those will be solved with new parts that are coming for the next test, and they should not affect Heikki tomorrow. We have saved a number of tyres up for tomorrow and that means we can run through the whole tyre programme we had set for the last day of this test which means we should leave here with a better understanding of how the 2012 compounds behave and decent amount of data we can use to prepare for next week’s test.”