• Second Barcelona Test Day One

Who said what after the first day at Barcelona

March 8, 2011

A round-up of comment after the first day's testing at Barcelona

Force India

Nico Hulkenberg "It was good to be back in a Formula 1 car as the last time I drove was about a month ago in Valencia. It was also my first outing in the VJM04 so there were quite a lot of new systems to get used to, such as the KERS and moveable rear wing. There's definitely a lot more work for the driver to do on the steering wheel and quite a lot of information to take in and get to grips with. We ultimately finished a little early with a reliability item just before the lunchtime break, but although we are still learning about the new systems, I can see we're heading in the right direction for the first part of the year."

Paul di Resta "All things considered, a good afternoon of running. We missed a bit of running after lunch as the guys fixed the problem from earlier in the day but when we did go out we got through a lot of productive work. It was my first time running the KERS system as we didn't run it last time in Barcelona, and all went well with that. Using the DRS [drag reduction system] and deploying KERS together takes some time to get used to but with time it will become a lot more natural. We also used the hard and soft tyre compounds from Pirelli and are understanding their behaviour a lot more. I'm looking forward to building on this programme tomorrow when I'll be in the car all day."

McLaren

Jenson Button "This morning, I did a number of short runs and, in the afternoon, we did some long runs, looked at set-up and balance, and spent the rest of the day looking at tyre consistency. I know there's not much testing left - I only have one more day in the car - but, after today, I feel we can make further positive progress over the next few days. Given the limited amount of set-up work we've completed this winter, I feel we now have a good base upon which we can build. And that's nice to see."

Red Bull

Mark Webber "It was a pretty good day and not much has changed since last week. We got some good laps in today. I think everybody is limited by tyres - we don't have unlimited sets of tyres these days, so the mileage is a bit controlled by how many you have at your disposal. But, all in all, we had a good afternoon and got some good information."

Ian Morgan, head of race engineering "Today was the first proper test for Chassis 02 and I'm happy to say everything went according to plan. We had a mixture of things to get through today, concentrating on some short runs in the morning and then longer race-distance type runs in the afternoon. The only difficulties we encountered were the slightly low ambient temperatures and some windy conditions. It would be nice to get the chance to test in hotter conditions and we hope for a bit of increase as the week goes on. But that was a small problem really on a pretty useful day for us."

Sauber

Sergio Perez "The morning session was quite positive with all the updates we have here. The afternoon started over an hour late for us because of an hydraulic leak, but in the end we managed to recover a bit. I hope Kamui can complete the evaluation work tomorrow. On Thursday I will be focussing on getting ready for the race in Melbourne."

James Key, technical director "Generally it was a good day of work despite a few problems after the lunch break. We had our start of season package on the car with a lot of new parts for both tidying up areas on the car and improving its performance. It is a significant aero package and it generally worked. We spent the morning evaluating new parts and carrying out back to back comparisons and aero measurements. In the afternoon we then worked on set up changes to adapt to the new package and tyres. So far we have seen reasonably positive results. Unfortunately for Sergio he had traffic on his fastest lap towards the end of the day, but this is nothing to complain about. Tomorrow with Kamui we will be running a similar programme, doing basic set up work and further evaluations."

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