- Silverstone Test - Day One
Water leak cuts Ferrari's day short
Pedro de la Rosa says the opening day of testing at Silverstone was going "fantastically well" for Ferrari until it was cut short by a water leak.
The test was the first time de la Rosa has been behind the wheel of the F14 T, on a day where he carried out tyre testing duties for Pirelli. Ferrari only added one lap to the 48 it completed in the morning session, but de la Rosa thinks the team was competitive in the stint it did complete.
"Yes," de la Rosa said when asked if there was a problem. "It was all going fantastically well; we had a very good morning and then in the afternoon we had a water leak with the cooling system so we had to call it a day … it was something we were not expecting but it cut our day a bit short."
As Tuesday marked de la Rosa's first experience with a V6 era car, he is pleased with the way he adapted to life behind the wheel of the F14 T.
"It was pretty good I would say. The fact that I jumped in to the car and immediately in a new car with a new regulation - because we should never forget that 2014 is very new, I am experienced but with the V8s and this is a completely new Formula for me as well - I was straight on there feeling very comfortable doing competitive lap times straight away.
"So I am pleased because of that, it means the correlation is pretty good. It still has to improve and we have to push and we have to make sure that we make it better but it's a good starting point. I'm pretty proud of the work we have done in-house."
On top of de la Rosa's efforts at Silverstone, the Spaniard says fellow countryman Fernando Alonso was doing work of his own in the Maranello simulator.
"We've done mainly correlation work. I was working before this work doing the correlation trying to set up the simulator and all the tyre models; everything just as close as we could. Today Fernando was checking that it was like the race, so we were doing some testing in both directions."
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