Bahrain II, Day 1: Marussia test report

The final pre-season test got underway at the Bahrain International Circuit today, with Max Chilton at the wheel of the MR03-01.

The day ran smoothly, with no major issues, enabling Max to achieve the Team’s targets and add valuable mileage to the MR03’s pre-season tally.

Jules Bianchi will now take over the car for two days, with Max returning to the track for the final day on Sunday.

Max Chilton

“It’s great to finally achieve some reasonable mileage and also to have some consistency to our running once again. At this stage, there is still so much to learn about the car, so the information we have gathered is really important for the engineers. We have also had some positive signs in terms of reliability today, so all in all, I’m quite positive and we have a good basis now for the rest of the week. I’ll be keeping a close eye on the work we are doing over the next couple of days and I look forward to being back in the car on Sunday.”

John Booth, Team Principal

“We are all very pleased that we have made such good progress today and achieved our target of being able to run the MR03 in high and low fuel specification. We are reasonably happy with the performance of the car and the reliability is also starting to come, although these are complicated cars and we are treading carefully. There is only a short space of time now until Melbourne, so the work we will do over the next three days will be crucial. We have helped that process significantly by putting in place some firm building blocks for the rest of the week. We have had a challenging time in pre-season testing so far, but it looks like we are starting to turn the corner and motivation within the Team is high.”