Column: Barcelona day 1: Webber leads Hamilton

The first day of the final week of testing got underway with wet conditions and a few wet flags, but after the lunch break, the slicks came out, and the lap times started to tumble.

Grosjean and Gutiérrez brought out the red flag in the morning - Grosjean in the first 30 minutes of the day, and Gutiérrez just before the checkered flag came out to end the first half of the day's testing. Hamilton was the fastest, with a lap of 1:41.614.

The teams returned to a damp circuit after lunch, but Massa was the first to venture onto the slick tyres. The Brazilian was much faster and the times eventually got down to 1:22.693. This was Mark Webber's fastest time, and the fastest of everyone.

"We got one hour at the end of the day at half-sensible conditions and we had a look at a few different compounds," the Aussie said.

"We opted to throw on some tyres and see how the car went, and that went okay."

"We've still got work to do, we are seeing some very fast times from the other cars. There are some very strong teams out there. We're not on our own, that's for sure."

Hamilton was second fastest and Jean-Éric Vergne was 3rd fastest. The Frenchman had been at the top of the leaderboard for the majority of the morning, but wasn't too active during the second half of the day.

Bottas was 4th, "It's a shame we were disrupted a bit by the wet weather, although this did allow us to run on the wet, intermediate and dry tyres."

Pérez, Gutiérrez, and di Resta were 5th, 6th and 7th respectively.

After doing a race simulation and completing 112 laps, Massa finished the day in 8th place, ahead of Chilton and Pic. Romain Grosjean also had some other problems, with the Lotus E21 having hydraulic issues in the afternoon - 11th fastest.

The testing continues tomorrow at the Circuit de Catalunya.

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  • Date of b. Apr 17 1986 (39)
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  • Weight 71 kg
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