Guillaume Rocquelin felt positive about the opening day of pre-season testing for Aston Martin Red Bull Racing at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, with Daniel Ricciardo ending the day with the quickest time overall.
The RB14 also showed good reliability straight out of the box, completing 105-laps of the 4.655-kilometre Spanish circuit, which Rocquelin, the Head of Race Engineering at Red Bull, says was the most amount of track time they have managed on an opening day for a number of years.
Despite the cold conditions leaving the team with limited amount of useful knowledge of the RB14, Rocquelin as pleased with what transpired on Monday.
“That was a good start to testing for us,” said Rocquelin. “The fact that this year we had the car finished ahead of schedule certainly helped I think; just having that deadline of last week’s filming day meant we had to be able to fire the car up and run.
“And I think the value of that deadline shows in what we got done today, which is certainly the largest lap total for a first day of pre-season testing that we’ve had in some time. It’s a validation of some of the changes we made over the winter.
“It was a good outing, we got a lot of laps under our belt and we had good reliability. That’s all you can ask for. It is day one and we take nothing for granted, but overall, we’re pretty pleased with what we achieved.”
