Doornbos makes his RB2-02 debut

After Christian Klien and David Coulthard made their debut in the renewed RB2 at Valencia last week, it was Robert’s turn this time around at Barcelona yesterday. Buckled up in his new ‘toy’ supplied with a brand new customised seat the doors of garage nr 14 opened already at 09:00h this morning!

Main objective of this weeks RBR testsession in Spain is to make as much mileage as possible divided over longruns of 8-10 laps each. An oilleak in Robert’s installationlap however, delayed the start of today’s programme for about two hours. After Robert seriously started testing at 11:00h, the 24-year old Dutchman lapped the Circuit de Catalunya some 40 times divided over four runs. To make up for the lost time in the beginning of the day, the team decided to stick to the basic set-up of the car and to focus mainly on the evaluation of the behaviour of the car in race trim and the Michelin tyres. As the clouds above the 4,627 kilometer long Spanish track were already starting to pack soon after lunch, the team decided to run several software checks and failure modes between 14:00 and 15:00 hours. Heavy rainfal prevented Red Bull Racing from any further serious testing in the remainder of the afternoon unfortunately.

Laps: 46
Position: 03 (out of 07 drivers)
Best laptime: 1:18.439

Robert Doornbos “The new car is definitely a big step forward. In the quick righthanders the increased level of downforce pushes the limits and makes the car feel more steady at high speed too. This morning my mechanics told me to expect a physically tough day as they scheduled to do over 100 laps, but due to an oilleak and the rain later on today we only managed to do 46. As we decided to make as much mileage as possible we didn’t reserve any time to work on the set-up of the car. I hope David and Christian will get the opportunity to make more mileage with the cars in the upcoming days!”