Driver: Pastor Maldonado / Valtteri Bottas
Chassis / engine: FW35-01 / RS27-5409/3
Location: Circuit de Catalunya, Barcelona 4.655km
Objectives: Tyre testing and aero evaluations
Weather: Dry and sunny
Air & track temps: 5-16ºC / 4-33ºC
Mike Coughlan, Technical Director: We brought our updated core bodywork for the first race here this weekend. Pastor spent the morning doing system checks with it before Valtteri went through new sets of each compound tyre this afternoon. Tomorrow we aim to do more performance runs with some further upgrades ahead of Australia.
Pastor Maldonado: We were running quite a few new parts this morning so our focus was on learning more about them and how they make the car behave. It felt very different, but it’s too early to say how much performance gain they will bring. We have some good data for the engineers to analyse now, so we will see. I was able to do a good time despite the limited running which shows that we are still improving.
Valtteri Bottas: I could really feel the difference today running the updated bodywork. We saw some improvements immediately but we still need to work on the car balance to maximise the potential. Overall, we learnt a lot and it’s nice to see the work everyone has been doing at the factory having a positive influence on the car. It’s now up to us to get the lap time out of it.
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