Thursday March 1 2012
Driver/ Jenson Button
Location/ Circuit de Catalunya, Barcelona
Track length/ 4.655km
Weather Warm and sunny. Maximum ambient temperature 19.4°C
Laps completed 64
Kilometres covered 298kmBest laptime 1m23.510s at 11:16
Programme
First day of the final pre-season test and the Vodafone McLaren Mercedes team continues preparations ahead of the Australian Grand Prix, running Jenson (Thur/Sat) and Lewis (Fri/Sun) at Barcelona’s Circuit de Catalunya.
The team is planning on gradually introducing a suite of new components to the MP4-27 during this test. Focus for the opening two days will primarily be on pitstop practice with a full race crew and further race prove-outs – including some more time-consuming set-up work. The back-end of the test will be spent focusing on analysing and learning about our race-one aerodynamic package.
Team manager David Redding said: “Having completed more than 2000km at Barcelona last week, today was always going to be more about quality than quantity. We wanted to drill a little deeper into our understanding of the car, and that meant undertaking some bigger set-up changes that wouldn’t ordinarily be available to us during a grand prix weekend.
“We made good progress and we’re satisfied with today’s results.”
Driver for day two - Lewis Hamilton