Team Lotus‘ first day of testing in Barcelona was cut short by a gearbox lubrication issue this afternoon, preventing Heikki Kovalainen from completing a race simulation.
The Finn completed 54 laps as the third pre-season test got underway at the Circuit de Catalunya today, finishing the day tenth fastest.
“It was good to start the day with some runs on the intermediates in proper damp conditions,” said Kovalainen. “There wasn’t a lot of standing water on the track [after some overnight rain] but it was pretty damp all round – we needed to try out the inters in these conditions so we’ve now amassed some very useful data on those.
“After that we wanted to do a race distance but the gearbox problem meant we couldn’t complete that part of the plan. Despite this I’m still finding that the car has good balance and is basically a decent package – we’ll sort out the problems and tomorrow we’ll try the race distance again and see where we are after that.”
It certainly wasn’t a perfect day for the team in Barcelona, but Chief Technical Officer Mike Gascoyne sounded fairly positive at the end of the day. “It was a reasonably productive day although we had to stop slightly earlier than planned due to a gearbox lubrication issue,” he explained. “This morning we were able to run on the inters on a damp track for the first time and we have obtained some useful data from those runs. We worked through the rest of the compound choices throughout the day on high fuel loads which is helping us learn more about how to maximise the performance of the Pirellis with the car.”
