Less degradation than on previous tyres - Pic
Caterham had its two race drivers in the seat on the final day of the young driver test. Both completed an identical programme with Giedo van der Garde running before noon and Charles Pic in the afternoon.
Giedo van der Garde, CT03-#05, 1:35.155: “That was a useful morning’s work. 65 laps is quite a bit over a full race distance here and we’ve got through a lot of tyre work so everyone’s pretty pleased with how it went. The runplan meant we were looking at both short and long run tyre performance and we’d targeted about the number of laps we completed, so now we have a lot of new data to work on with Pirelli and our own tyre engineers to see how today can help us in Hungary next week, and for the rest of the year. The main thing for me today was finding out how much more consistent the tyre drop off was on the new sets Pirelli brought to Silverstone – I think that’ll help everyone a bit as it should mean we can push harder in the races, but until we get to run them in a full race weekend it’s still too early to tell completely how they’re going to behave.”
Charles Pic, CT03-#05, 1:35.576: “Like my teammate I think we’ve had a productive afternoon. We repeated the same plan we ran in the morning and it obviously wasn’t about times today, it was about working with the new Pirelli tyres and evaluating setups that we can work on for Hungary and the rest of the season. I was quite pleased with how consistent the sets we used today have been, the deg levels are certainly lower than the tyres we’ve used so far this year and that should help us.”
