Romain Grosjean felt it was a ‘pretty good’ first week of pre-season testing at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, with the Haas F1 Team driver completing over two hundred laps across his day and a half in the VF-20.
Grosjean took over the car on Thursday from team-mate Kevin Magnussen, who had put the VF-20 through its paces throughout Wednesday’s opening day of the test, with the Frenchman going through a number of programmes as he completed a remarkable one hundred and fifty-eight laps of the Spanish circuit, the most of any one driver across the day.
With testing reduced from eight to six days for 2020 due to the extension of the Formula 1 calendar to twenty-two races, Grosjean knew it was important to get as much work done as possible, and the good reliability of the VF-20 enabled him to do a lot of what they wanted to do.
“I saw how many laps we were planning to do this morning and I thought it was a pretty fruity run-plan,” said Grosjean on Thursday. “That’s a positive though, it shows that the car is reliable.
“With two days less testing this year over these two weeks we’re trying to do as much as we can. The early morning was tricky trying to get the tyres warmed up, similarly at the end of the day when the sun goes down – tyre temperatures drop.
“It was a positive day with a lot of testing. We’re now looking at our options for tomorrow to see what we want to test in the morning.”
‘We’ve Kept Working on what We Wanted to’
Grosjean continued in the car on Friday morning, completing another forty-eight laps, and the Frenchman was content with the amount of work they were able to put in across the day and a half he had in the car.
The thirty-three-year-old ran a number of different baseline set-ups during the morning, going through everything the team had planned, with his time good enough to end the day twelfth fastest of the sixteen drivers who took to the track.
“It was a pretty good morning and a pretty good first week,” said the Frenchman. “We’ve done a lot of testing and we’ve seen the lap times drop from other people.
“We’ve kept working on what we wanted to, we’ve trialled as many options on the car as we could. Generally, it’s been very positive, everything we’ve tested has been good. We ran the whole program we had planned for the morning – I’m very happy with that.”
