Barcelona testing day three: Mercedes GP convincingly tops the table – Formula 1 news
The testing continued at Barcelona’s Circuit de Catalunya on Sunday and Mercedes GP driver Nico Rosberg posted the fastest time of the day of 1 minute and 23.168 seconds after managing 92 laps.
Mercedes testing sessions in Valencia and Jerez were not so promising. They faced a lot of problems and were unable to be in P5’s. Only once Michael Schumacher topped the tables on day two of Jerez test sessions.
“For sure we still have some problems, but it's going in the right direction, today we learned a lot and made some progress, so things are improving,” Rosberg said.
It was the first day with real wet conditions apart from the first day where the track dried out quickly and did not gave teams much time to use Pirelli wet tyres. The morning session was wet and windy and all the teams were able to use Pirelli’s wet compound
for quite a few laps.
Nico said, “It was interesting running with the intermediates this morning and, although the warm-up is tricky, we definitely improved our understanding of the tyres.”
Following Nico, in second was Renault’s Vitaly Petrov who managed 93 laps with few on Pirelli’s wet compound.
Third was McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton who focused on shorter stints in the morning with a couple of pit stop simulations. Pastor Maldonado of Williams, despite of some technical errors and a spin in morning session, finished fourth.
Fifth was Red Bull’s Mark Webber in his RB7 who completed a mammoth 139 laps and collected some good data on the Pirelli wet compound. Sixth was Jarno Trulli whose outing was cut short due to unavailability of spare parts in the Lotus pit. Lotus’ chief technical
officer Mike Gascoyne explained it as a ‘frustrating day.’
Sergio Perez finished seventh. Commenting on his performance Sauber’s technical director James Key said that it was a useful day as it let them use both tyre compounds and evaluate the differences between them.
Eighth was Force India’s Adrian Sutil who completed 102 laps with a fastest of 1 minute and 25.720 seconds. He was pleased with the car as it was working well with the Drag Reduction System.
Toro Rosso’s Sebastian Buemi and Daniel Ricciardo shared the car with Buemi driving the car in morning session in wet conditions finishing ninth and Ricciardo driving in afternoon session finishing 13th.
Tenth was Ferrari’s Felipe Massa who took the car from Fernando Alonso from day two. He had a few off-road bumps but his car was undamaged. Timo Glock of Virgin finished 11th and Giorgio Mondini of Hispania Racing Team finished 12th.
Mondini is driving a Formula 1 car after almost five years.
Narain Karthikeyan of HRT finished last on the tables with only 32 laps. Last day of Barcelona testing will be Monday after which a decision will be made whether teams stay at Barcelona or move to Bahrain for the final test.
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