There have been nine days of testing thus far this winter and there have been nine different drivers who have set the fastest lap on each day of testing – and Sebastian Vettel is not one of them!
Mark Webber became the ninth on Thursday in Barcelona as he set a best lap of 1m22.693s, although this is some way from the best lap of the previous test, which was set by Sergio Perez at 1m21.848s. The problem was intermittent rain which meant that the dry tyres were only useable at the very end of the day and so the results were slightly skewed depending on who was doing what. Webber was 1.6 secs ahead of his nearest rival after 90 laps of running. Second fastest was Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes, which completed 113 laps for a best of 1m24.348s, while Jean-Eric Vergne was third fastest with 1m25.017s lap after 59 laps. Fourth fastest was Valtteri Bottas, who did 85 laps in his Williams to record a best of 1m26.458s, followed by Perez, who did a 1m26.538s after 100 laps. Fellow Mexican Esteban Gutierrez was next with a 1m26.574s lap after 92 laps, while Paul di Resta was next with a 1m27.541s, after 57 laps.
Felipe Massa did 112 laps for a best time of 1m27.541s ahead of Max Chilton (Marussia), who did a 1m28.166s after 78 laps; Charles Pic, who recorded a 1m28.644s lap after 83 laps and Romain Grosjean, who completed 52 laps but did no better than a 1m34.928s, because of the rains.
Joe – bit light on facts given this is such an important test. Were you there?
I don’t do tests. I provide the basic facts. there are plenty of other sites that rehash press releases much better than I do. In any case, anyway who claims to know what is happening is a fraud, because even the teams don’t know. I could put this blog behind a pay wall and then with all the money that the people give me (ho ho). I suppose you think that travelling expenses grow on trees.
At the risk of sounding like a creep you don’t read Joe’s blog for who did what time to the nearest decimal point and possibly not for Scarbs type diagrams of the latest wizzy part.
At the risk of sounding disinterested in all that stuff I think the human side is far more interesting which is why I come here. Sky and BBC (Anderson and Kravitz) both do the techie stuff well (seems that way to this non-engineer anyway) – and of course they have the advantage of moving pictures to do so.
The first important test for ‘outsiders’ (99.99% of us) is Melbourne. Unless you enjoy following the ‘sandbagging-conspiracy’ theorists – should be a myriad articles on that theme out next Monday (hopefully not on this site?!)
second bite – rereading Joes article seems to me it’s all there anyway even to 3 decimal places!.
It would be great to see Webber get WDC this year and Lewis to win at least a couple of races
Maybe insights that you only get by attending the most important test pre season?
BBC F1 technical analyst Gary Anderson in Barcelona:
“Red Bull have been running their version of a ‘passive DRS’, a system that gives extra downforce reduction by triggering automatically at a given pre-set speed. They have an inlet duct just in front of the rear lower beam wing so I think they are using the low pressure under the centre section of the beam wing to get the initial airflow. They then have a vertical tube to the lower surface of the upper wing. It appears to connect to the wing as opposed to having a gap like the Lotus and Mercedes versions. Using the pressure differential across the lower beam wing should be more consistent than the other versions we have seen which just use the low pressure at the rear of the car. The system is notoriously difficult to make work properly but if anyone can it is Red Bull.”