Jean-Eric Vergne set fastest time for Red Bull on opening day of Young Driver Test – Formula 1 news
Jean-Eric Vergne driving the Red Bull car set the fastest time on the opening day of the Young Driver Test in Abu Dhabi.
Vergne also set the fastest time of the morning session, bettered that performance in the afternoon to set his best time of 1 minute and 40.011 seconds. Jules Bianchi was second for Ferrari with a 1 minute and 40.960 second time finish. Robert Wickens came
in third for Renault but was 2.2s behind the leader.
It was a close race with Fabio Leimer running on Sauber coming in fourth with Gary Paffett fifth in his McLaren. Max Chilton had some issues with the KERS in his Force India car but still managed to set the sixth quickest time. Just behind him was Valtteri
Bottas in the Williams car with the updated exhaust.
Sam Bird driving the Mercedes was the least productive one as he only managed to complete 12 laps in the morning due to a transmission problem and had to be confined to the garage. Although he managed to do 40 laps after lunch and set the ninth fastest time.
Charles Pic driving for Marussia Racing beat teammate Adrian Quaife-Hobbs’ time by 0.3s.
11th quickest was the Toro Rosso driver Stefano Coletti, who admitted that it was a challenging experience getting used to the different characteristics of the Formula 1 car.
“Nothing I have driven so far in my career has come close to the feeling I got driving a Formula 1 car,” Coletti said. “At first, I found it hard to adapt to the feel of the power steering through the wheel, especially in the high speed corners, but once
I got used to it, I could start to enjoy the experience even more. It was interesting testing the new tyres and it meant I was fortunate to run with several new sets, which is not normally the case.”
Pirelli gave the teams only the supersoft compound tyres to test the 2012 tyres and the teams also used the session to run the development parts.
Overall, it was a good opening day session and served its purpose of giving experience to the young drivers and the teams to have a look at the pool of the talent available for the coming years.
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