Kobayashi sets the fastest time of the week in Barcelona

Kamui Kobayashi set the afstest time of the week’s testing in Barcelona on Friday with a 1m22.312s in his Sauber. Second fastest for the day was Pastor Maldonado in the Williams with a 1m22.561s laps. The Sauber team completed a total of 395 laps of the track over the four days, a total of 1834 km, which added to the Jerez test of 1,315 means that the team has now done nearly 3,150km of running with the new car. Sergio Perez was fourth fastest overall with a lap of 1m22.648s. The team started the day doing aerodynamic work and then Kobayashi tried some qualifiers at the end of the morning test. In the afternoon the team concentrated in longer runs.

“I’m quite happy. We achieved a very good mileage today,” said Kamui. “The set up changes we did in the morning meant an improvement in lap times, which, of course, is very positive. There is still a lot of work to do in terms of understanding the car and the different tyre compounds at different fuel levels, but we are working in the right direction. I think it was a good test for us.”

Second fastest overall for the week was Pastor Maldonado in the Williams with a lap of 1m22.391s and 240 laps of running. The other two Williams drivers had a day each with Bruno Senna setting the 16th best time and test driver Valtteri Bottas right behind him. In total the team completed more than 450 laps, which meant more than 2,130 km, which added to Jerez means that the team’s total with the new car is 3,700 km.

“We’ve had a really productive day’s testing to end an excellent couple of weeks,” said Mark Gillan, Chief Operations Engineer. “Today Pastor went through a competitive race simulation and both the car and he performed very well, ending the day with some long run comparisons. We have gathered a prodigious amount of data and we will now regroup back at the factory to understand how to further improve the set-up and development direction.”

Force India ended up third fastest of the week with Nico Hulkenberg’s 1m22.608s. The team completed a total of 1,830km, which means that the team has done 3,200km with the new car. Paul di Resta was sixth fastest overall with a 1m23.119s.

“Today’s programme with Paul completes another very productive test for us,” said Jakob Andreasen, Chief Engineer.
“Having focussed on reliability in Jerez, we’ve been able to come here and get straight on with performance work to really start understanding the car. We’ve built up some good knowledge of all the dry tyre compounds, collected lots of aero data and given the drivers a good opportunity to experiment with setting up the car. What is encouraging is the feedback from both Nico and Paul, which is positive about the handling of the car, especially over longer runs.”

Sebastian Vettel was fifth fastest overall for the week with a best of 1m22.891s, while Mark Webber was 13th overall with a 1m23.774s. Together the two completed 364 laps, which gave them nearly 1,700km of running, which means that the team has done only 3,000km in total, rather less than than might have been hoped for.

“We had quite a lot of work to get through today,” said engineer Ciaron Pilbeam, “basically finishing off the performance and data gathering work we started at the beginning of the week. It went well and we got through everything we wanted to, even though it was pretty busy this morning. Unlike yesterday, we had no issues at all and it was a good day’s work.”

Seventh overall for the week was Fernando Alonso in the Ferrari with a 1m23.180s. Felipe Massa was 10th overall with a 1m23.563s, while the pair managed 350 laps, a total of 1,625 km, with 1,200km in Jerez the team has managed 2,800km thus far.

McLaren put in a huge effort in Barcelona with the drivers completing 464 laps between them, giving them a total of 2,160km of running. This means McLaren has done 3,550 km of running with the new car. Jenson Button was eighth overall with a 1m28.200s, while Lewis Hamilton was 11th with a 1m23.590s.

Ninth overall was Michael Schumacher in the new Mercedes, who set a 1m23.384s, while Nico Rosberg was 15th having done a 1m23.843s. The two completed 400 laps, which gives them 1,850km in total, with some extra running for the promotional day.

“We have had a very positive first week of running with the F1 W03,” said Ross Brawn. “After five full test days, we have completed over 2000 km, Nico and Michael have done consistent mileage and reliability has been ok, aside from a couple of problems earlier in the week. Both drivers have already completed full race simulations, and this really is a tribute to all the hard work that was done back at base in Brackley and Brixworth to ensure we hit the ground running this year with the new car – as well as to the efforts of our day and night shifts at the track in Barcelona. This basis means that the drivers and engineers have been able to work well with the car rather than chasing problems, and next week we hope to focus even more on getting performance out of our current package.”

Twelfth overall was Daniel Ricciardo in the Toro Rosso, with a 1m23.618s lap. Team-mate Jean-Eric Vergne was 14th with a 1m23.792s. The two youngsters completed 1,375 km of running, which gave the team around 2,800km of running since the start of testing.

“From a technical point of view, we completed our programme, working through a large number of test items, which are the type of thing you can only achieve in winter testing when you have a lot of tyres,” said Laurent Mekies (Chief Engineer). “Some of the work of making these changes to the car was time consuming, which explains why we have not completed such a large number of laps, but it was important to get the answers on the items we wanted to evaluate here. We can be reasonably satisfied with the results achieved. The drivers are getting into the rhythm.”

Caterham driver Heikki Kovalainen was 18th overall with a 1m26.035s, while his new team-mate Vitaly Petrov was 20th overall with a 1m26.448s. The team did 1,100 km of running, which brought their total to around 1,900km.

“In contrast to last week in Jerez, T02 has been a pretty tough week for us,” said Riad Asmat, Caterham CEO, “but this is why we come testing. Everyone in the team has worked hard all week to make up the time we have lost to what are relatively small issues each day, but they are all issues that take time to fix.”

The Marussia driver did plenty of laps in the old 2011 cars, while Lotys F1 Team went home on the first day afer just seven laps.