Barcelona Test #2 – Day Three

Claire Williams, Deputy Team Principal: We have had a very busy time in Barcelona. Everyone in the team, here and at the factory, has done a fantastic job to ensure we managed to complete the majority of our planned programme. Unfortunately, some of our run plans were impacted by the number of engine reliability issues that materialised over the six days, and which primarily affected Nicholas’s running, but we have every confidence that Mercedes HPP will resolve these prior to actually racing. It’s still early days, but the car certainly looks better than last year’s and that’s what we wanted to demonstrate, that we can make progress. We now have some time to go through all the data we’ve gathered in order to make sure we have the optimum configuration going into Melbourne. We will continue to fight hard to bring continual improvement to the car and look forward to seeing it take to the track in Australia.

Dave Robson, Head of Vehicle Performance: Conditions for the final day of this season’s winter testing were good with cool calm conditions this morning and light cloud cover during the afternoon. Following the rain yesterday morning, the track seemed to have recovered fully to be in very good condition. George was back in the car today and completed a programme like that of Nicholas yesterday. Performance running in the morning featured the softer compounds as we looked to finalise our setup testing. During the lunch break we conducted a full grid simulation before going into some longer high fuel runs using the harder compounds from the 2020 range. Like Nicholas yesterday, George enjoyed a productive day, refining his car setup and reacquainting himself with the vagaries of race tyre management.

Overall, we have had a good winter testing period and have made the most of the six days available in this newly compressed format. We have completed in excess of 100 laps on all but one of the days, which has allowed us to complete almost everything that we intended.

George Russell: It was a productive day and we got in almost all the laps we wanted to. We had a good morning doing qualifying simulations and managed a race simulation in the afternoon. We got plenty of laps on the board and it was good preparation ahead of Australia. No doubt we are in a better position than last year, but we’re not going to get carried away. I am optimistic that we can go to Melbourne and be in the fight, but until we get there we won’t know for sure. From both myself and everyone at the team, we are going to go there and do our best to get everything out of the car.