Nico Rosberg terms decision to delay new car debut ‘right’ – Formula 1 news
Mercedes AMG Petronas driver Nico Rosberg says that the team’s decision to delay the debut of its new car W03 is justified after the strong performance of the car during the Formula 1 pre-season testing until now.
During the first pre-season test held at the Jerez circuit in Spain, Mercedes used the last year’s car for the test run and launched its new car in the second test at Circuit de Catalunya, Barcelona.
However, after being able to complete 399 laps during the four days of the test last week with Michael Schumacher and Nico Rosberg, the car has appeared to be quite reliable.
Nico’s performance during the test run improved as he completed consecutive eight laps on soft tyres during the morning session of the final test and in the afternoon session, he tested on hard tyres with four runs of 11 to 13 laps. Moreover, he expressed
that the condition seemed better than the last year.
“The tyre degradation is still an issue, but it's certainly better than it used to be; better than 2011. But it's mainly reliability. It's obvious how different that is,” said Nico.
Nevertheless, Nico was quite satisfied with the test run at the first day of the last test at Barcelona as he finished fifth in running the fastest lap after being the busiest driver of the day with the completion of 128 laps.
“I think it shows that bringing the car to the second test [as opposed to the Jerez opener] was the right decision, because we have no reliability problems,” he said.
Furthermore, he said that the day with the new car was very pleasing as the team was able to complete a lot of laps and was able to work out many things which would definitely help in making the significant improvements for the upcoming F1 season starting
in Melbourne, Australia on March 18, 2012.
“The reliability is better than last year and it means we can focus more on performance. I'm not sure [what it means for Melbourne]. We have to wait and see, but it's great to be part of all this progress,” said Nico.
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