Stoffel Vandoorne says that the in-season test day he had at the Bahrain International Circuit helped the McLaren Honda Formula 1 Team perform some of the tests they had hoped to have done in pre-season testing.
The Belgian had his first problem-free day of the season, completing eighty-one laps during his day in the MCL32, but was mainly playing catch up after unreliability had affected running so far in 2017.
Vandoorne believes they ticked off a number of things that they could and should have done before the season started, and is now hopeful that the bad luck that has plagued his and team-mate Fernando Alonso’s seasons so far will come to an end.
“Of course, with all the track time we have missed during winter testing we are catching up on a lot of things,” said Vandoorne on Autosport. “There are still things that we are doing during race weekends that should have been done already during testing.
“For me it was nice to just have a normal day, it felt like it was a long time ago that we spent so many laps on track. We did a lot of learning that day. It’s the first day of the year that we ran without any issues.
“We did a lot of set-up changes and we could understand a lot more about the package that we have. It helped us a lot in terms of understanding where the performance of the car comes from.”
