Daniil Kvyat was given responsibility to be first to run Scuderia AlphaTauri’s new AT01 chassis on Wednesday, with the Russian going on to complete one hundred and sixteen laps of the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya.
AlphaTauri are a new name on the Formula 1 grid for 2020 but the team formerly known as Scuderia Toro Rosso enjoyed a relatively trouble-free opening day of pre-season testing, with Kvyat completing a number of positive runs as the team learnt more about how the AT01 handled.
Kvyat said the AT01 ‘felt like home’ quickly and that helped him get up to speed, but more time is needed for them to tune it up and find the ‘sweet spot’.
“I think it was a pretty comfortable day, we didn’t encounter any big issues and we ran reliably,” said Kvyat. “The car felt like home pretty much straight away.
“We’ve completed the routine checks at the start of the day which made our morning a bit slow, but it’s necessary for the team at the first test. Once that was done we were able to get some good laps in and understand the new car a bit better.
“We also worked on setup items, some of which you wouldn’t really try on a race weekend. It’s hard to comment too much on the progress made over winter because it’s the first time we properly run the car and you certainly need more time to find the sweet spot.”
AlphaTauri ‘Relatively Pleased’ with First Day’s Work – Egginton
Jody Egginton, the Technical Director at AlphaTauri, says the team are ‘reasonably pleased’ with what they learned on the opening day of the test, but he knows there is still a lot of work to do to truly understand the characteristics of the AT-01 chassis.
“Overall, we are satisfied with how today went,” said Egginton. “The morning session was primarily spent gathering aero data and conducting background tests before moving onto some basic setup work in order to begin to understand how the new car responds.
“This work continued into the afternoon with some longer runs, making good use of the C2 tyre and incorporating some pitstop practice for the mechanics toward the end of the day.
“In summary, we are reasonably pleased with what we have learnt so far, but at the same time it’s very early in the test program and we still have much work to do in order to understand where we are with the new car and confirm our development priorities.”
