Sauber driver Kamui Kobayashi says team is making progress – Formula 1 news
Sauber driver Kamui Kobayashi says that the team is definitely making progress during the final pre-season test held at Circuit de Catalunya, Barcelona as compared to the previous test.
Kobayashi said that the focus of the team was running the car under the race conditions during the morning session and balancing the aerodynamics during the afternoon session, on second day of the final test.
Furthermore, he said that the day was quite positive for the team despite the problem of hydraulic leakage during the afternoon and enormous number of red flags during the morning.
During the second day of the last test, Kobayashi set the sixth quickest lap time of 1 minute 23.836 seconds which was just 1.2 seconds slower than the best lap time of Romain Grosjean of Lotus. Moreover, he could only complete 77 laps during the day due
to hydraulic leak but he said that he was quite delighted by the car’s performance during the test run.
“I am pretty happy with the car and its handling under race conditions,” Kobayashi said. “We wanted to improve compared to the last test, and we clearly did that. Obviously we couldn't do everything we had on our programme, but I think we can compensate
for that.”
Sauber head of track engineering, Giampaolo Dall’Ara said that the team had been very pleased with the lap timings during the day but could not follow the planned testing programme due to some issues like the timing of the red flags which was wrong, during
the morning session.
In addition, he said that the team lost more than one hour in the afternoon due to the hydraulic leakage and we fixed it after taking the gear box off, which was quite time taking.
Nevertheless, Dall’Ara said that such disturbances happen during the testing sessions and actually help the teams to make the necessary improvements and significant changes in the operations. Therefore, the overall experience with the test run of the car
was pleasing.
Moreover, Kobayashi said that the team had positive feeling and it still had time for the test run to make progress before the season opener at Melbourne.
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