The Scuderia AlphaTauri team encountered some issues with their car on the first day of the second pre-season test at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya in Spain.
The team ended up with a total of 86 laps, even as their drivers were in fourth and fifth positions on the time charts. Daniil Kvyat came to a stop after his fast lap time which saw him finish in fourth position at the end of the day.
Jonathan Eddolls, the Chief Race Engineer, said: “With only a short period of time between the last test and the start of this one, the team worked hard on analysing the data gathered and feeding that into the setup direction and test plan for this week. We chose to split the day with Pierre driving in the morning and Daniil in the afternoon, but the test didn’t get off to the flying start we had hoped for, as during the first run we noticed an issue on the data.
“On inspection, a pipe had come loose which cost us almost a couple of hours, so we had to compress Pierre’s programme to a series of shorter runs across the C3 and C4 tyres. Because of the problem we had this morning, we moved the normal start of day aero rake running to Daniil’s runs straight after lunch to gather the valuable aero data.
“After that, Daniil had a trouble-free afternoon and was able to cover some further setup tuning over both short and long runs before closing the day with performance runs on the C3 compound. There is a lot to look at overnight in preparation for the final two days to maximise our understanding of the AT01 before we head to Melbourne.”
The focus is on Honda, the engine suppler to both Red Bull Racing and its sister team AlphaTauri. The Honda engines in terms of their performance and reliability will play an important role in the fortunes of both teams this season.
Toyoharu Tanabe, Honda F1 Technical Director, said: “After last week’s work here in Barcelona, we analysed all the data from both teams and so we started this second test reflecting what we learned from that. Over these three days, we are continuing with function checks, as well as working on optimising the settings.
“We are now in a phase of fine tuning, in preparation for the season opener in Melbourne. Both our cars had to spend a while in the garage this morning and in the afternoon we focused on recovering from that delay. Despite that, everything seems to be progressing smoothly on the PU front.”
