Bahrain I, Day 1: Mercedes test report

MERCEDES AMG PETRONAS continued its pre-season testing programme at the Bahrain International Circuit today, with Lewis Hamilton taking the wheel of the F1 W05 for the first day. Lewis’ best time of 1:37.908 was good enough for third place on the timesheets, with a consistent 74 laps on the board.

— The focus today was to optimise running on the hard tyre in temperatures more suited to race conditions
— Lewis completed two twenty-lap stints with the team taking a close look at tyre performance and car data
— A brake issue ended the programme slightly early today, with the team confident this will be fixed in time for tomorrow

Nico Rosberg will be in the car tomorrow for the second day of the test.

Lewis Hamilton

It’s been impressive to see us start the Bahrain test with good mileage and reliability, especially when you see how difficult it is for everyone with the new regulations. The team can be very proud of this after so much hard work. Today was another good test of the car to see if any issues came up –we had a small issue with the brakes at the end but were still able to achieve a lot of laps today. We’re not aiming to be top of the timesheets at the moment, it’s more about ticking the reliability boxes, but we can be happy with where we are before the halfway point of the pre-season tests.

Paddy Lowe

We ran our programme as expected today until the running came to a conclusion slightly earlier than we would have liked with a brake issue. We did get through all of the planned data logging runs and the lap count was high. There is a great deal still to be done and a lot of the things we’ve been focusing on during the break since Jerez are working as intended. That is a great credit to the team working on the car at the factory and at the track to carry on from where we left off at the last test. Nico will be in the car tomorrow and we look forward to doing more long runs in consistent weather conditions.