Hulkenberg tops times in Wednesday test, Haas F1 second quickest
Nico Hulkenberg topped the times for Force India on the third day of 2016 testing in Barcelona.
However, Romain Grosjean and Haas caught the attention by setting the second fastest time – albeit 2.7s off the pacesetter.
Tires were the key to lap times as Hulkenberg used supersofts and what appeared to be a low fuel load.
“I’ve come away with some good first impressions as we continue to learn about this car,” said the German. “We tried quite a lot of things today and, although we need to do some more fine-tuning, it does feel like we are moving in the right direction.
“The important thing is that we are getting lots of laps under our belt at this early stage and we are able to start exploring different setups. Melbourne is not far away, but it feels like we are on schedule and days like this are very encouraging. You never know what the other teams are doing so we’re just focusing on ourselves and working hard.”
Grosjean was on softs and was flattered by the fact that many of the big names behind stuck to slower medium tires and had different agendas. Nevertheless, it was a good effort by the Frenchman, as the Haas logged 82 laps.
“It's getting there, the initial first data was already not bad,” said Grosjean. “We changed it a little bit yesterday with Esteban, but you know, we're not here to find a good anti-roll bar or whatever, it's just get some mileage, find the aero maps, is it correlating well with the aero from the wind tunnel or not. That's what we did in the morning and just checking that all the parts stay on the car, that's good.
“It's a good baseline, the first sensations were great - I'm feeling good in the car, there's a lot of work to be done, but the first impressions are good. The behavior, generally, there is no weakness in terms of aero and it feels quite good going into the car and consistent.
“The power unit is certainly different from the one I used in the past, but it's a good engine, working quite well - we haven't yet gotten too much into details, but everything I've been asking and we've been trying has been working quite well - so, that's good.”
Kimi Raikkonen was third fastest on his first outing with the new Ferrari, having lost a lot of time this morning with a fuel system problem. Mercedes decided to split the day with Nico Rosberg running in the morning, and Lewis Hamilton the afternoon, simply to give them a break after they both ran huge mileage earlier in the week at a track that is always hard on the neck.
“It's amazing to see that the car is already so reliable and we started trying some basic set up changes this morning too,” said Rosberg. “It was good to split the time on track with Lewis. The car is able to do so many laps, so I think it's probably a more effective way of doing things. Two drivers doing half days will do better work compared to 160 or 170 laps from one person. We want to get the maximum out of the very few testing days we have this year, so to me it makes perfect sense.”
Full Wednesday results:
