BARCELONA TEST – DAY TWO

Wednesday 22 February 2012

Driver: Sebastian Vettel
Car: RB8
Laps: 104 laps
Best time: 1:22.891
Circuit length: 4.655km
Fastest lap: N. Hulkenberg (1:22.608)

After spending yesterday on development, Sebastian Vettel and a full Red Bull Racing race team put the RB8 through the rigours of a full race simulation today.

Sebastian said: “I’m happy that we got a lot of laps done. Unfortunately, we had a little bit of a problem, it was small, but with testing you stop whenever there’s a issue, take a look and see what’s what and that always takes up a bit of time. But nevertheless, in the afternoon I was quite happy. We got a lot of laps done, more than 100, so we got through most of the programme.

“I think we are on the right road with the car,” he added. “The first impressions at the last test were fine. The car reacted the way we expected. I keep talking about the loss of downforce compared to last year, as we don’t have the tools we had, but this is the same for everyone, not just us. So, we’ll get on top of it and we’ll spend the coming days trying to make improvements, find more performance and make the car faster. But so far, so good.”

Head of Race Engineering Ian Morgan said “It was again so cold this morning that we had problems with pit stop practice, simply because the equipment was freezing up as we tried to use it. After that we ran a bit of a free practice simulation, but we discovered a small problem, which lost us some time. It was only a minor issue and didn’t require major work, but it meant that we had to run a compressed Quali simulation before lunch. Afterwards we got through a whole race distance, which, at the car’s first go, is always very encouraging.

“Mark is in the car tomorrow for his race simulation, so we hope we can get through the full programme with him with no dramas.”

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