Racing Bulls is “in a much better place than on Monday” at Formula 1’s Barcelona pre-season test, according to Liam Lawson.
Amid F1’s regulatory overhaul, teams are allowed to run on three days each in the five-day shakedown – which is taking place behind closed doors – and Racing Bulls picked Monday, Wednesday and Thursday.
The Red Bull Ford-powered VCARB 03 has had a productive test so far, completing – according to SoyMotor’s unofficial timing data – 88 laps on Monday with Lawson, 120 laps on Wednesday with his rookie team-mate Arvid Lindblad, then 64 laps for Lawson on Thursday morning alone.
Racing Bulls did cause two red flags on Monday and Wednesday, but this did not prevent the team from accumulating what amounts to 1267km’s worth of data (787 miles).
“We just keep learning,” Lawson told F1 at lunchtime on Thursday. “We're making, obviously, big gains, but so is everybody else. Very, very different cars, but in a much better place than we were on Monday, which is the main thing. We just need to keep learning and improving the car.”
Asked if Racing Bulls was where it expected to be in terms of mileage and data, the New Zealander replied: “In terms of mileage, yes. We've honestly had a pretty strong test in terms of reliability, so that's been a box ticked.
“In terms of expectations, it's very hard. Obviously, we don't know where anybody else is. So that will still be quite unknown for a while, but the main thing is we're getting the laps down that we want to, and learning what we need to about our car.”
Lindblad is now taking the VCARB 03 over for the afternoon. “We carry on learning,” Lawson added. “We'll obviously sit down and go through the stuff that we tried this morning and make a bit of a game plan for some new stuff this afternoon to test.”
Racing Bulls will then have nearly two weeks to go through all the data before the first Bahrain test from 11-13 February.
Photos from Barcelona shakedown
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