Eric Boullier was naturally pleased with the outcome of the penultimate day of pre-season testing as the McLaren F1 Team finally got significant running around the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya with their MCL33.
Stoffel Vandoorne completed one hundred and fifty-one laps on Thursday, setting a best time of 1:18.855s that was good enough to finish sixth fastest, but the most pleasing thing for Boullier, the racing director of the Woking-based team, was the amount of things they were able to tick off their testing wish-list.
Boullier was particularly pleased that Vandoorne was able to collect significant data on long runs and race simulations, while further progress was made with the performance levels of the car.
The MCL33 has one further day of track action ahead of its race debut in Australia later this month when Fernando Alonso returns to the car on Friday.
“Today was a very positive day for the whole team,” said Boullier. “We completed a significant amount of mileage and also achieved a solid amount of work on our test programme ‘wish-list’.
“As we near the end of our allocated eight test days, it’s very satisfying that we were able to turn our attention to race simulations and longer runs, which all help towards preparing our package as comprehensively as possible ahead of the first race of the season and beyond.
“We also completed a number of further useful development and correlation tests which have been a very valuable portion of our test programme today. We’re still learning a lot, and every lap we do is extra useful data for our armoury.
“Now we hope to round off the test with a solid final day tomorrow for Fernando and complete our pre-season preparations before Melbourne.”
