Scuderia AlphaTauri Barcelona test week 2 day 1 with both drivers on track 26.02.2020: BARCELONA TEST 02 – DAY 1 Circuit de Barcelona – Catalunya Driver: Pierre Gasly (am) - Car: AT01-02 Best time: 1:17.540 - Laps: 25 Driver: Daniil Kvyat (pm) - Car: AT01-02 Best time: 1:17.456 - Laps: 61 Wednesday, 26th Febru

BARCELONA TEST 02 – DAY 1
 
Circuit de Barcelona – Catalunya
Driver: Pierre Gasly (am) - Car: AT01-02
Best time: 1:17.540 - Laps: 25               
 
Driver: Daniil Kvyat (pm) - Car: AT01-02
Best time: 1:17.456 - Laps: 61

Wednesday, 26th February 2020


 
Pierre Gasly (Car #10):


“We had a little issue this morning which compromised our session. For sure it wasn’t ideal as we had planned more laps and we lost some mileage, but these things happen, and we recovered as much as we could in the final hour. It was an intense end to the session as we explored different setup directions for the car with the little time we had.



There were a couple of interesting things which Daniil continued working on this afternoon. We’ll try to maximize every opportunity we have left on track to learn more about the car, I feel there’s a lot more to come, but everyone has the same amount of track time so we need to be as efficient as possible.”
 


Daniil Kvyat (Car #26):


“I think it was a productive half-day of testing for me. When it’s a new car you always get interesting results, so I was able to understand it better every run I did. We continued with more setup changes you wouldn’t normally have time for to try in free practice, to be able to see how the car reacts.



We’re not looking for pure performance yet, we’re looking to fine-tune the balance and see how the changes behave in different corners; I think we can be happy with all of the data we gathered. We needed to tick as many boxes as possible today, especially now that testing is quite limited this year and I’ve only got one day in the car left.”
 





Jonathan Eddolls (Chief Race Engineer):


“With only a short period of time between the last test and the start of this one, the team worked hard on analysing the data gathered and feeding that into the setup direction and test plan for this week. We chose to split the day with Pierre driving in the morning and Daniil in the afternoon, but the test didn’t get off to the flying start we had hoped for, as during the first run we noticed an issue on the data.


On inspection, a pipe had come loose which cost us almost a couple of hours, so we had to compress Pierre’s programme to a series of shorter runs across the C3 and C4 tyres. Because of the problem we had this morning, we moved the normal start of day aero rake running to Daniil’s runs straight after lunch to gather the valuable aero data.



After that, Daniil had a trouble-free afternoon and was able to cover some further setup tuning over both short and long runs before closing the day with performance runs on the C3 compound. There is a lot to look at overnight in preparation for the final two days to maximise our understanding of the AT01 before we head to Melbourne.”
 



Toyoharu Tanabe (Honda F1 Technical Director):


“After last week’s work here in Barcelona, we analysed all the data from both teams and so we started this second test reflecting what we learned from that. Over these three days, we are continuing with function checks, as well as working on optimising the settings.



We are now in a phase of fine tuning, in preparation for the season opener in Melbourne. Both our cars had to spend a while in the garage this morning and in the afternoon we focused on recovering from that delay. Despite that, everything seems to be progressing smoothly on the PU front.”



- Fabiana Valenti, photos Red Bull