Williams Martini Racing and Felipe Massa finished the fourth and final day of pre-season testing behind the Mercedes AMG PETRONAS duo in ninth place.
The morning session was spent doing aerodynamic correlation work that was successful but due to an issue with the car systems over lunchtime their running in the afternoon was vastly reduced from what was planned.
Felipe Massa only managed to complete 54 laps of the Circuit de Catalunya in Barcelona on Thursday, nearly half of what he completed on Wednesday in his first run of the FW38. Team-mate Valtteri Bottas nearly completed double of Massa’s runs with a total of 214 laps.
The Brazilian only just managed to beat his previous fastest lap time by 0.229s to finish the final session in ninth with a time of 1m26.483s. Massa felt like he had an unsuccessful day with his positioning and lap count, with the veteran driver wishing he was able to log more laps for Williams than he did.
“I am not so happy with today,” said Massa. “It was not really a useful day. The most important things was that we carried out our aerodynamic tests this morning, to understand the numbers and everything around the car.
“Unfortunately, we couldn’t run much this afternoon. I had hoped to do more laps than I did.”
