MERCEDES AMG PETRONAS continued the third and final pre-season test at the Bahrain International Circuit today, with Lewis Hamilton taking the wheel of the F1 W05 for the second of four days’ running in Sakhir this week. Lewis’ best time of 1:39.041 from 89 laps put him seventh on the time sheets.
— Today’s programme targeted a race simulation programme in the morning, followed by setup work in the afternoon
— Lewis emerged for his first run at 09:04 local time, completing 61 laps before the lunch break at 13:00
— A further 28 laps followed in the afternoon, before a gearbox problem curtailed running with 90 minutes remaining
— Mercedes-Benz Power Units today completed a total of 1905 km between all teams
— Nico Rosberg will take the wheel of the F1 W05 for the third day of the test tomorrow.
Lewis Hamilton
Like every team, we’re encountering problems every day and we’ve still got some work to do in terms of both reliability and speed. There are no specific problem areas, just lots of different things we need to improve. It’s important to get as much mileage under our belts as we can and just as important to discover any problems before we get to Melbourne. It might be frustrating at times but finding them at this stage is actually a positive. We really don’t know where anyone stands right now and we have enough to concentrate on without looking at how other teams are getting on. The focus is on ourselves and will continue to be right up to the first race. Today was a fairly average day but I’ve got one more to go before we get to Melbourne, so hopefully that will be a bit more productive.
Paddy Lowe
Our morning programme targeted a baseline check run followed by a race distance simulation. The day started off without any problems, save a small spin for Lewis on cold tyres at the start of the first run, which briefly halted his progress but caused no major dramas. Once we got going again Lewis put together a good run, with encouraging readings in particular during the middle stint on the hard tyre, before a failure in the ERS system delayed running during the final stint. We returned to the track after lunch to conduct setup work. However, a problem with the gearbox unfortunately meant that our running was curtailed around 90 minutes early. Despite this, we have learned a number of valuable things from today’s session and look forward to getting back down to work tomorrow.