That’s a wrap on winter testing for another year, and it’s perhaps harder than ever to tell the order of team performances. This is due to the new Pirelli tyres possibly being even more unpredictable and difficult to understand than the previous years.
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| Pirelli Will Be A Huge Influence To The First Races Of The Season (at least the hard and medium tyres have distinctive colours now!) |
Tyres definitely are the focus still despite the rising temperatures we saw in the test, even at 24C the tyres were degrading, making race simulations and set-up work difficult and unreliable to a certain extent, which was emphasised by big names.
Defending champion Vettel took a review of the testing season - "if you sum up the whole three tests, we were all limited to what the tyres could do. It was extremely difficult to read some set-up changes and find a good direction with the car because the tyres were simply not good enough".
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| Vettel Finding The Conditions A Bit Slippery |
Jenson Button seconded this. His confidence in his new McLaren has grown since he and Perez admitted set-up struggles, but the tyres have given inconclusive results, finding progression extremely slow.
Rain fell on day one and two of the test, so most of the action and what we can take from the test happened on day three and four naturally. Mercedes have been the headline grabbers with both Hamilton and Rosberg topping the timesheets on these days. All Mercedes personnel though both driver’s and management have been frequently suppressing the media’s expectations. Of course we can assume low fuel loads, but the times nevertheless were still widely considered remarkable by experts.
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| Rosberg & Mercedes Have Much Potential |
Ferrari and Lotus have gone from extremely reliable to the least, bringing out the most number of red flags between them. Ferrari are hard to read in terms of pace particularly due to small amounts of high fuel runs, and with rivals McLaren are the most are the hardest to predict. I won’t be surprised if they are on pole or even in the middle of the grid amount 12th. Don’t be surprised yourself either.
In the midfield Adrian Sutil made his return to Force India after a year's absence, putting in some decent times, it will be interesting to see him up against Paul di Resta again, and perhaps one of the best teammate match ups to look out for this year. If di Resta wants to prove big teams that they missed a trick by not recruiting him, he needs to beat Sutil by a decent margin, and achieve some podiums like Perez, or competitively lead a grand prix like Hulkenberg in Brazil.
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| Alonso's F138 In The Heavy Rain |
After Jules Bianchi lost out on the Force India seat to Sutil, simultaneously Razia's sponsor money from Brazil didn't clear into Marussia's account, and Bianchi quickly went from being disappointed to relieved. On day three, he finished half a second clear of the Caterham, which Chilton has found hard to do. Could be the gem of the back of the grid teams.
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| Jules Bianchi Debuting For Marussia |
Next time we see the cars will be in PF1 in Melbourne!
Every race F1 Hub will bring a full Race Report, and throughout the seasons will be talking about both hot topics widely publicised, and unusual thoughts and reports.
Our website www.f1hub.co.uk will be launching in the next week before the start of the season!
Nick, F1Hub
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