Friday 1 March 2013
BARCELONA TEST 2 – DAY TWO
Driver: Sebastian Vettel
Car: RB9
Laps: 65 laps
Best time: 1:22.743
Circuit length: 4.655km
Fastest lap: R. Grosjean (1:22.716)
VETTEL ROUGHS IT IN BARCELONA ON THE WAY TO P4
Sebastian Vettel’s penultimate day of winter testing was something of a mixed bag with the poor weather causing a few delays to the champion’s work in the morning. Once up and running, however, Seb got through a busy programme of set-up work and managed to fit in some evaluation of test items. With drier conditions after lunch, the afternoon was about refining set-up on his way to the day’s fourth-fastest time.
“I didn’t do that many laps today, but to be honest the weather wasn’t great and it was a pretty rough day in terms of the wind,” he said. “It’s very cold as well. The tyres aren’t really working properly and I think everybody is suffering the same problem, struggling to make the tyres last for more than a lap. It’s difficult to compare things you are testing and also to compare yourself to others.”
Race Engineering Co-ordinator Andy Damerum said: “Once again the weather was the main inhibitor today. This morning the conditions weren’t great, so it was a bit of a slow start for everyone. The track was pretty greasy and because the wind wasn’t as severe as yesterday, it stayed pretty damp all morning. That meant a lot of the time we were in that crossover between intermediate and wet tyres, which is tricky. However, in a strange way it actually helped us in the morning as we had some parts we wanted to test and the conditions allowed us to spend the time in the garage getting that sorted to no great detriment to our running. In the afternoon we were able to move on to dry tyres, but the wind was quite strong at times and just as with Mark yesterday, that didn’t make life easy for Seb. Having said that I think we got quite a lot of work done today, especially in gathering data on the items we wanted to test. The weather is supposed to be much better tomorrow with a balmy 14 degrees forecast, so hopefully Mark will get a smooth run on his last day of testing.”
