Romain Grosjean completed 87 laps on Tuesday around the Bahrain International Circuit as he worked through an intensive data-gathering program that included work with a new brake supplier.
The Frenchman finished fourth fastest for the Haas F1 Team, and felt positive with the results of the day, with Grosjean getting a lot of information for his engineers to digest.
“It was a pretty good day,” said Grosjean. “We went through most of the stuff we wanted to, so that’s pretty good, very positive.
“There’s a lot of data now to look back through at the factory. That’ll help us know what we want to do in the future. It’s testing, we’re not looking for performance, but I’m happy with the day.”
Grosjean revealed that Haas had a good day testing with new brake manufacturers Carbone Industrie, after they became more and more disillusioned with Brembo after suffering numerous brake issues last year.
“We still have a lot of work to do around them and see the performance, but it feels better, as it was last year,” said Grosjean. “Otherwise it’s quite similar. We just need to see if we can actually make it work with all our mapping.”
The only thing that may hinder their introduction in Russia at the end of the month would be if they cannot make it work with their mapping, but Grosjean is confident that the switch can be made, with more testing scheduled for Wednesday with team-mate Kevin Magnussen.
“I think it could come for Russia. It’s all ready,” said Grosjean. “But only if we’re confident that we’re going to start Russia without a hitch, as you cannot miss FP1 and part of FP2 because you’re not right on mapping. We’ve collected a lot of data today and I think the guys are going to be working on that.
“We can see on the data that some parts are better. Since China we’ve got some updates on the Brembo brakes and that was working much better. But we had to wait a year-and-a-half to get the updates.
“Now we’ve put on the other ones, I’ve got better modulation to the end of braking, which I like. If we get it where we want to have it, it will be good.
“With the Brembo we have the baseline. We know how it works. On the other one, we’ve worked for an afternoon but it’s not a lot. We did seven or eight runs. The time to change the brake balance, the time to change the mapping and get it more or less where you want.
“I think Kevin is going to keep working tomorrow and then we’re going to decide.”
