Red Bull Racing driver Daniel Ricciardo is the fastest after the morning session of the first day of winter testing in Barcelona. The Australian realised a best time of 1:20.179 during a long stint of more than thirty laps on the medium compound.
There have been two red flags so far. Fernando Alonso spun off in the first hour of testing. He went backwards into the gravel at Turn 16 after he lost a wheel. A problem with a wheelnut caused the crash. McLaren was able to fix the car and send Alonso back out again before the lunch break.
You couldn’t make this up. Come on McLaren, you need to bring your ‘A’ game this season! 1.3 secs off top spot and I could say that’s where you were with Honda towards the end of the season but everyone is in test mode now so everything changes. The really quick cars for the season will be fast out of the box, so there are no real surprises except perhaps Renault. McLaren have just signalled their 2018 placement as firmly in the midfield unless they can get themselves sorted and quickly. There doesn’t seem to be much wrong with the Renault power plant, or the Honda either. What an irony!
Lap times will say very little about their positions for this year. What will be representative is amount of laps. Progress for both Honda and Renault are to be expected, the question is: whom did it better?
Top 4 teams actually put in pretty impressive times if all of them did those in race simulation runs like I think they did. Weather is horrible for small window Pirellis and they managed to run faster than the Spanish GP a year ago. Specially Renault has put impressive times compared to other teams.
I wonder if something is up with Mercedes. Remember the raw amount of lap times they put in last year in close to every session? Meanwhile, Honda's already clocked 93 laps, and Red Bull got in 105. Surely this session wasnt representative?
It was very cold and afternoon saw rain. specially afternoon running offered very little development value. Except stuff like RB did with optical flow tracking paint on Halo.
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Circuit de Catalunya - 26 February 2018
Azerbaijan Grand Prix
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calle.itw
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Times, yes. Speedtraps looked pretty bad though.