Barcelona Testing 2019 (Circuit de Catalunya)

no tiny cup for me, i'll take an espresso venti please. is that what star****s calls a large?

 

10:22 Ferrari has offered an update on Vettel's crash yesterday afternoon, which it says was caused by a rim issue. It reckons the rim was damaged "a few seconds before by an impact with a foreign object".

 

Well, so much for the delaminating carbon fiber theory! In any case, not Vettel's fault.

 

Alexander Albon does 1:16.981

2018 pole lap was 1:16.173


Worth noting that Toro Rosso has a ferrari/alfa style wing concept.

 

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Progress today !

11:09
Leclerc's lap catches the eye
Just one flying lap from the Ferrari on that stint - but it was a very significant one by all accounts.
The 1:17.253 wasn't set on one of Pirelli's very fastest tyres, so is very quick indeed once you tyre correct it.

11:26
Ferrari into the 1:16s
He's done it again.
Charles Leclerc posts the second-fastest time of testing - 1:16.949 - to get within a whisker of Alex Albon's pacesetting effort and take Ferrari below 87 seconds as well.

 

I'm getting excited....

 

11:36
Leclerc hits the front!
That Ferrari has certainly been motoring in the last half an hour

Leclerc takes over from Albon at the top with a new benchmark of 1:16.658 on the C4 tyres.

That's within half a second of last year's Spanish GP pole time.

 

So we start to see some serious times now ...just .2 from last years pole by Leclerc

 

This seems much better than having concern re: Carbon Fiber manufacturing. What the heck did Seb hit?

Regardless, great to see car back out on the track with Leclerc delivering some great times!

 

Absolutely!

 

1:16.361
Well done to the whole team for getting here after yesterday's shunt !

 

Pretty sh-- luck to lose almost a whole day's testing for no fault of their own.

Unlike the other guys who had issues but gained some knowledge on what to fix on their cars.

 

Beautiful and absurd. Can't we do away with much of this aero nonsense?

 

Good numbers from Leclerc but only .6 faster than STR rookie on same tires. I hope the 16 has more in the tank (literally) because no way RBR is slower than STR. Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

Interestingly, on the same compound as Mercedes set its time (C2), Leclerc was about a second faster than the Mercedes but then didn't get the supposed level of bump Perelli says between compounds when he set his time on a compound three compounds softer.

 

At this stage, testing times are not representative of a car's potential, apart from revealing reliability issues.

 

Probably still a little sandbagging going on. Ferrari was definitely slowing in the final sector on some of the previous runs.

 

My thoughts exactly.
In fact, aero is where most of the teams' budgets go; which seems unbeliveable
I thought Brawn had been recruited to clean that up, but no, it seems.

 

I think the top players keep their cards close to their chest and are sandbagging up to a point, with no intention of revealing how competitive they are.
Only the lesser team want to shine in testing, to please their sponsors mostly, and that's why they put the softer tyres very early on to make headlines, IMO.

 

If they are sandbagging as much as we suspect, i wouldn't be surprised if the cars are 2 seconds quicker than last year

 

It's alarming all the same, IMO, that a rim can get damaged from kerb-hopping and provoke an accident.