Hamilton and McLaren P1 as testing ends

The 15 days of pre-season testing are now complete and the 11 teams now pack up in Barcelona and return to base to prepare for the Bahrain Grand Prix which take place a week Sunday.

Lewis Hamilton’s run from this morning, which saw the 2007 champion record a best lap of 1:20.472s, remained unbeaten throughout the day and is the fastest time of the week with his rivals close behind.

The impressive pace of the McLaren on the long runs was emphasised this afternoon as Hamilton caught Michael Schumacher in the Mercedes and after shadowing the seven-time champion for a few laps, was able to pass and quickly pull away.

While we don’t know the relative fuel levels, both were on long runs indicating that MP4-25 is working very well indeed.

Red Bull Renault opted to run Sebastian Vettel this morning with Mark Webber taking over the RB6 for the afternoon session. Webber upped the pace, ending the day just two-hundredths of a second shy of Hamilton’s best and a fraction ahead of Felipe Massa.

After setting the second fastest time in the morning on a simulated qualifying run, Ferrari and Massa turned their attention to race pace this afternoon, ending the day third overall ahead of Adrian Sutil in the Force India and Vettel.

Flow visualisation paint was very much in evidence at Mercedes today as Michael Schumacher took over the MGP W01 for the final day of testing. The paint helps the team understand the aerodynamics in real life situations. Schumacher ended the session sixth fastest proving the MGP W01 could well be a challenger for victories this year.

Rubens Barrichello spun off track in the morning and at the start of a long run in the afternoon the FW32 ground to a halt with a hydraulic failure. The Brazilian veteran however was right on the pace in seventh position.

Kamui Kobayashi was another to suffer late session mechanical gremlins as his Sauber Ferrari failed. The promising Japanese rookie was eighth fastest, less than half a second behind the pace-setting Hamilton.

With the fastest eight so closely matched, Sebastien Buemi was next up in his Toro Rosso Ferrari, over a second shy of Kobayashi and nine-tenths clear of Robert Kubica who tried a new front wing on the Renault.

Lotus spent the morning looking at weight distribution on the new T127 challenger and then switched attention to race simulation work in the afternoon with Heikki Kovalainen behind the wheel. Despite a problem that halted the team late in the session, Kovalainen was able to put in reasonable number of laps.

Virgin Racing lost further time to a hydraulic issue late in the morning, a problem that persisted for much of the afternoon limiting Lucas di Grassi to just 49 laps over the day.

Looking at the times, there is little to choose between the front-runners in terms of ultimate pace and that the battle in Bahrain will be a closely fought contest.

Most pundits expect McLaren and Ferrari to have the edge, but many other teams seem capable of challenging for top honours.

That concludes the pre-season test programme and next time the cars take to the track will be at Sakhir on Friday 12th March.