JA at Barcelona test - Day 2

I come away from the Barcelona test feeling that this is going to be a great season of racing, but in a very different way from the McLaren vs Ferrari battles of the last two years.

The testing performances we have seen so far suggest that McLaren has, if not a mountain, then certainly a big hill to climb, while Ferrari, BMW and Toyota look very strong, one might almost say equally strong.

If the performance we’ve seen here is carried over to the early part of the season, as it has been in recent years, then you could see Kubica, Heidfeld, Raikkonen, Massa, Trulli and Glock fighting for wins and podiums early on. I don’t think it will be too long before Alonso joins in either, as the Renault team made a big step forward this week thanks to a new front wing and underfloor parts. They started behind and are still a bit behind, but closing in fast.

Kimi Raikkonen said that the Ferrari team has not yet pushed for the ultimate lap times, implying that there is more to come, but from what I saw in Barcelona there is little to choose between the top three teams on pace. Certainly when the BMW does similar runs to the Ferrari, it sets similar lap times. When it comes to racing, Toyota may have a slight disadvantage from not running KERS at some tracks early on, but they are adamant that the decision, taken early, not to start the season with KERS was the right one. Their car is very driveable, predicatable and consistent. Jarno Trulli thinks he can do great work with it. The car is still not as comfortable as some of its rivals over the kerbs, but it’s a vast improvement on last year’s model.

The new rules have cut the maximum downforce level available on the cars to below the level they used to have on low downforce tracks. This has meant many things, but one of them is that braking stability is now harder to find, as downforce is an important part of getting the car slowed down. I stood at the heavy braking zone at Turn 10 for a few hours this morning and studied this closely. Everyone is more jittery than they were there last year, but if I had to pick a winner under braking I would say that it’s the Ferrari. The Brawn car is giving a little bit away there compared to the Toyotas and BMWs, and so is the Renault.

Another feature of the 2009 cars is that they seem to oversteer more than last year’s cars, particularly in the slower corners, the back end looks like it wants to swing out. This is caused by the fact that there is more front grip from the slick tyres and front wing relative to their counterparts at the rear. It‘s what Nico Rosberg was talking about in the video positing I did here last week. It is quite noticeable in the final sequence of corners at Barcelona.

To my eye Kovalainen was having to wait another 30-40 metres on the exit of a corner to apply the power and that is lap time being dropped. The McLaren car seems to have less grip than the others and that would also explain why they weren’t very quick in the wet at Jerez last week. McLaren tried different floors, rear wings and diffusers here to try to settle the rear end of the car down. They did make some leaps forward in lap time, such as yesterday afternoon when they went from doing mid 1min 24s laps to doing mid 1m23s. It could have been a lighter fuel load, but the general performance suggests otherwise. The Ferrari at the same time was also doing 7 lap runs and was lapping in the high 1m 20s and low 1m 21s, while Trulli did a super consistent long run with 10 consecutive laps in the 1m 21s.

The Ferrari, BMW and Toyota drivers, in contrast to McLaren, are able to get straight on the power into the apex of the corner, the car bites and goes. They look fast and smooth.

The times from day 2 are affected by the fact that some teams were doing qualifying simulations while others are not. So the gaps appear larger than they are.

Perhaps the most interesting little nugget I picked up in my two days at the test was the start practice the drivers did at lunchtime and again at the end of the day. On one occasion, Kovalainen lined up just in front of Raikkonen and when the McLaren launched, the Ferrari went too. Within 300 meters the Ferrari was in front. It was that noticeable. Now Kovalainen could have been playing games, knowing the Ferrari was behind him and watching, but it didn’t sound that way. That pesky rear grip problem again. Unless McLaren come up with a quick fix, Lewis Hamilton is going to have a tough start to his title defence.

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