Red Bull endures troubled end of testing
After three relatively trouble-free weeks of testing, Red Bull Racing faced a broken front wing and later on a gearbox failure on its final day of testing in Barcelona, which restricted Sebastian Vettel's time on track.
Sebastian Vettel: “I’d love to be able to say more about today, but this morning I had an issue, I went off track and broke the front wing and had to come in. It took quite a while to get back out and then just before lunch we had a problem with the gearbox so it upset the whole day. After that there wasn’t much we could constructively do.
To be honest, it wouldn’t be fair to judge the updates we have, as I didn’t get many laps today. I think yesterday was quite a decent step and it was a good day for Mark, so we’ll take what we can from that.”
“Summing up, I think that with testing you always have something you’d run differently but you have to accept what you get. There aren’t many years you can give yourself a 10 out of 10, because it’s likely that things break or you stop for precautionary reasons. Overall, though, I think we can be quite happy with how we’ve done this time.”
Sebastian’s Race Engineer Guillaume Rocquelin added: “We’ve had a pretty smooth run all the way through pre-season and to have such a disrupted day on the final one is pretty disappointing. We hardly had any running in the morning and when we did manage to get out in the afternoon there really wasn’t much we could achieve in the short time available. It’s frustrating as the boys worked really hard all day. But when things like this happen you just have to roll with the punches.”
“If there is a positive to take from today it’s that it happened on the final day and otherwise Seb has had a pretty good run through the three tests. We’ve learned a lot, progressed the car well, I think, and now we’ll just look forward to taking it racing, where it really counts.”
Driver: Sebastian Vettel
Car: RB8
Laps: 23 laps
Best time: 1:23.608
Circuit length: 4.655km
Fastest lap: K.Raikkonen (1:22.030)
