McLaren Barcelona testing - Day 3 report

BARCELONA TEST – day three: “We’ll keep pushing”
Date- Thursday February 23 2012

Jenson Button, McLaren Mercedes

Photo by: xpb.cc

Driver - Jenson Button

Location - Circuit de Catalunya, Barcelona
Track length - 4.655km

Weather - Another warm and sunny day. Maximum ambient temperature 20.9°C, maximum track temperature 35.0°C

Laps completed - 114
Kilometres covered - 530km
Best laptime - 1m23.918s at 12:41

Programme

Jenson’s first day in the cockpit at Barcelona very much mirrored the programme completed by Lewis yesterday. Jenson and the team spent the morning exploring variations in set-up over a number of shorter runs and then moved on to a full race-distance simulation in the afternoon.

Jenson said: “We’ve done a lot of reliability work over the past three days – more than 100 laps on each day. Most of that has been longer runs, getting used to the feeling of the car over a long-run and set-up work for the longer runs.

“We’ve also been really working hard to understand this year’s Pirelli tyres and getting the car to work efficiently around them. That’s a key part of the programme this winter.

“There are a lot of cars out there that look competitive: so we’ll keep pushing. We should hopefully bring our upgrade package to the next test and that will see us through to the first race in Melbourne.”

Jenson concludes the four-day test tomorrow.

Driver for day four - Jenson Button

Duration of test - Four days (February 21-24)