Valtteri Bottas ended the opening day of the second pre-season test at the Circuit de Catalunya with the second fastest time of the day after completing 123 laps on Tuesday.
Bottas set a best time of 1m23.229s to end the day just 0.207s adrift of Nico Rosberg, but whereas the Mercedes driver set his time on the Soft Pirelli tyre, the Williams Martini Racing driver set his time on the Ultrasoft tyre.
Despite this, Bottas was happy to run untroubled throughout the day, and confirmed his thoughts from the opening test last week that the team have made improvements from their 2015 challenger with this year’s FW38.
“It was a good day today,” revealed Bottas. “We managed to run without any major issues with the car.
“It was very interesting discovering more about the FW38 and what kind of set-ups work for this car. I think we managed to make progress. We did some short runs today which I really enjoyed.
“I still agree with what I said last week – we have improved in the areas where we were weak last year. I am looking forward to tomorrow and continuing testing.”
