After a slow start, Vettel ran quickest on day 1 at Barcelona

After a slow start Vettel ran quickest on day 1 at Barcelona

After ten days spent analysing data obtained from the first pre-season test in Jerez, Formula One’s teams today returned to action in Spain for further intense exploration of their cars’ potential, this time at Barcelona’s Circuit de Catalunya.

Sebastian Vettel, Red Bull Racing RB9

Photo by: XPB Images

“It’s very important for us to put good mileage on the car and this morning that wasn’t really possible,” said Vettel afterwards. “We had a small software issue this morning, I think many teams had. That wasn’t ideal but we got it fixed and after that it was another decent day.”

“It is good to back in Barcelona. It is a good circuit to judge a car on and a good indicator of where you are but we need to be careful of doing that as it’s pretty cold at the moment and it’s quite tough to keep the tyres alive for many laps. So hard to know. But overall, not a bad day again.”

Commenting on the morning, Race Engineering Co-ordinator Andy Damerum said: “It was a slow start, which was a bit frustrating. However, I don’t think we were alone in that. Looking at the lap times and number of laps done by other teams I think quite a few had a similar problem to the one we encountered.

We managed to fix it just before lunch but it meant that our laps in the morning were effectively systems checks. Everything went better this afternoon, though, and we were able to get through quite a few items on our checklist and in the end managed 308km, so I’m quite pleased about that.”

“In the afternoon we were again working on some aero test items. The guys at the factory have been flat out since Jerez and as well as the things planned some time ago for this test there have been quite a few developments based on what we learned from Jerez. So there are plenty of things to get through here. Seb is driving again tomorrow.”

Red Bull Racing