Nico Hulkenberg tops Wednesday at Barcelona while others show close lap times – Formula 1 news
Nico Hulkenberg was the fastest man on the track on Wednesday at Barcelona.
Hulkenberg drove the car to set the best time lap at 1 minute and 22.608 seconds narrowly ahead of Sauber’s Sergio Perez. The performance on the day showed that Force India are going to be a stronger unit in 2012 and will pose some trouble for the top teams
Sahara Force India looks good and strong with a very reliable car so far. Since their crash during the first pre-season test, the team has not faced any trouble with the car. To be fair to the team the crash had nothing to do with the car it was actually
their reserve driver Jules Bianchi’s ambition to push the car to the limits which caused the accident.
The first day’s top driver Sebastian Vettel was in at number three on Wednesday with a best time of 1 minute and 22.891 seconds.
Red Bull have started to look good with each passing day and yesterday’s performance was a strong display of their 2012 prospects. Lewis Hamilton and Vettel even got a chance to have some of racing taste when Vettel got behind Hamilton on the track and tried
to pass him but Hamilton wanted the German to earn the pass. Eventually Hamilton did let him pass and after the day both said that they enjoyed the “good fun.”
Hamilton also said that Red Bull looks strong ahead of the season and is clearly the fastest car on the track. Overall though teams have started to show more reliability with five teams completing more than 100 laps in the day.
Ferrari has been facing a lot of trouble with their 2012 challenger and so far have not been able to fix the car to fully achieve its potential. Fernando Alonso driving the Ferrari set the 5th fastest time of the day at 1 minute and 23.180 seconds. Behind
him was Daniel Ricciardo in the Toro Rosso with a best lap time of 1 minute and 23.639 seconds.
At 7th place was Nico Rosberg who was expected to do much better on the day as he has shown good pace last year. Rosberg has openly said that he intends to be faster than Schumacher and was expected to run the car faster than that but there are still more
testing days to come.
Mercedes have so far shown good reliability as Rosberg completed 82 laps in the day. Last three spots were taken by Valtteri Bottas of Williams, Vitaly Petrov of Caterham and Charles Pic of Marussia with best time laps of 1m 25.738s, 1m 26.605s and 1m 27.343s
respectively.
Lotus of course was not part of the test anymore as they detected a fault with the chassis of their car. They will be participating in the final test before the season begins on March 18, 2012 with the Australian Grand Prix.
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