Adrian Sutil was pleased to complete a trouble-free day of testing to wrap up his preparations for the 2013 Formula One season. The first two days of the second Barcelona test had been heavily disrupted by rain but Saturday saw much more suitable conditions, allowing the Force India driver to put in 109 laps.
The German was able to evaluate Pirelli’s dry tyres and now feels in a much better position ahead of his Grand Prix return in Australia.
“A busy day of race preparation, which all went to plan. There was a lot of pit stop practice throughout the day and it’s good that we managed to do a race distance without any disruptions. It was less windy today, which made things easier, and the higher temperatures helped give us ideal testing conditions for understanding the tyres and the degradation.”
Chief Race Engineer Jakob Andreasen believes the day proved useful for both team and driver to rediscover their sharpness ahead of the new campaign.
“Blue sky and sunshine was a welcome sight this morning after two days of unsettled weather in Barcelona. This gave us a chance to run through our race procedures as part of a dress rehearsal before Melbourne in a couple of weeks’ time. We pretty much worked through a race weekend programme with performance runs and pit-stop drill. After lunch we managed to cover a race distance, which gave us information on tyre performance and proved very valuable for Adrian’s racecraft as he gets ready for his return to racing.”
