Bahrain II, Day 1: Mercedes test report

MERCEDES AMG PETRONAS began the third and final pre-season test at the Bahrain International Circuit today, with Nico Rosberg taking the wheel of the F1 W05. Nico’s best time of 1:36.668 from 89 laps put him fourth on the time sheets.

— Today’s programme comprised long runs and a limited amount of setup evaluation in the morning, followed by race procedure work (including practice pit stops / starts) in the afternoon
— Nico emerged for his first run just after 09:30 local time, completing 64 laps before the lunch break at 13:00
— A further 25 laps followed in the afternoon, before problems brought running to an end one hour earlier than planned
— Mercedes-Benz Power Units today completed a total of 2,332.522 km between all teams

Lewis Hamilton will take the wheel of the F1 W05 for the second day of the test tomorrow.

Nico Rosberg

That was not a fantastic day for us. We tried some new parts on the car and you find out a lot through doing that. But unfortunately we did not only discover good things today. I managed to do a couple of good laps before lunch but in the afternoon we had a few small problems which ended my running a bit earlier than planned. This shows that we are pushing everything to the limit and we still have a massive challenge in front of us during the last three days of testing. We need to maximise our time here to be prepared for Melbourne. But after a difficult day overall we are on the right path.

Paddy Lowe

We’ve re-grouped after last week’s test and come back with the intention of running as close as possible to our Melbourne race specification with the F1 W05. In addition to completing our final preparations from the reliability and performance perspectives, we have also brought a number of aerodynamic updates to the car for evaluation throughout the week. We’ve also been looking at a number of problems which arose during running last week and have introduced solutions for them. This first day got off to a slightly hesitant start, with a few minor issues on our side combined with a number of red flags interrupting proceedings. Once we got going, however, Nico got straight into some relatively long runs on the medium tyre; commencing each with race start procedures, ending with practice pit stops and evaluating a few setup variations in between. By lunchtime and into the early part of afternoon, however, a number of problems with the car began to emerge which hindered Nico’s progress and eventually brought our running to a halt an hour ahead of schedule. We understand what went wrong and will be reviewing it overnight with the aim of having a better day tomorrow.