Bottas fastest as Barcelona test comes to an end

F1 Test, Barcelona, Circuit de Catalunya

On the second and last day of testing at Circuit de Catalunya, Mercedes driver Valtteri Bottas was fastest in another very busy day for the team. Antonio Gionivanazzi was second fastest for Ferrari, and topped even more laps, going round 148 times and therefore the most active driver of the day.

As the Mercedes driver set his best time on super soft tyres, Giovinazzi used the hyper softs that are set to be used in Monaco. Lando Norris for McLaren third fastest using the soft tyres.

"It was a tiring day,", admitted Giovinazzi after his 148 laps. “We did a lot of laps, but I really enjoyed it. Apart from yesterday, driving the Alfa Sauber, I hadn’t driven in an official test session since last year in Abu Dhabi. We had an interesting programme to work on, with various things to test and different tyre compounds to try. The test was productive and delivered a really big amount of data to correlate with that from the simulator. To be at the wheel of a Ferrari is always a privilege and it was a fantastic feeling.

At Haas, Magnussen took over from Grosjean while Force India had two cars in action. Development driver Mazepin encountered a hydraulic issue on his car in the morning, but the car got repaired before noon, ending the day with a respectable 112 laps. Nicolas Latifi did Pirelli tyre testing, just like Vandoorne did in the second McLaren.

Spanish GP point scorer Charles Leclerc was back in his well known Sauber to go 7th fastest, 3 tenths ahead of Robert Kubica. The pole seemingly proved he is very ready to jump into a race seat, completing 123 laps without issues.

Toro Rosso chose to give Sean Galeal more track time after a disrupted day on Tuesday. The tester completed 83 trouble-free laps before handing the car over to Gasly.

"Due to the limited running yesterday, Sean drove for us in the morning and completed a number of high priority test items", said Jonathan Eddolls, Toro Rosse race engineer.

"The main items covered were a mix of aerodynamic testing and characterisation, cooling evaluation, tyre testing and a number of mechanical setup tests. We scanned quite large changes with the aim of understanding the full operational envelope of the car and we have found some very interesting directions which we need to analyse and explore further.

"Pierre took over in the afternoon, starting with some short runs with aerodynamic rakes fitted, but unfortunately we had an issue with the steering on the car, which took quite a while to change, so he didn't get out properly until 4pm. From this point onwards things ran smoothly and we covered the plan by shortening the runs somewhat, so we still managed to gather all of the required data.".