Red Bull’s Daniil Kvyat and Guillaume Rocquelin have admitted that they don’t know what their position in the pecking order will be in Melbourne after the penultimate day of testing.
Their attention is beginning to switch to the race weekend after Kvyat’s last day in the car before the Australian Grand Prix, where the Russian set a lap time of 1:25.141 to go ninth fastest. He completed 121 laps, working through pit stop practice, aero mapping work and a race simulation.
After the session, Kvyat believed he was ready to begin racing in 2016: “We almost got through our complete programme for the day, which was very useful and I feel we are ready for Melbourne. We had a couple of small issues today but nothing significant and it was a good final day. As for what we can expect in Melbourne, to be honest I have no idea!”
Many are predicting that the team will be in a battle with Williams, Force India and potentially Toro Rosso, but he just wants to wait to see what happens: “I’ll go there with no expectations and I’ll just do the maximum possible. These few days of testing have all been just about trying to make a better car, for myself and for the team, nothing else matters. We have done everything we can on our side and now we’ll see what happens.”
Guillaume Rocquelin, the team’s Head of Race Engineering, explained the programme they ran through to further prepare themselves: “Dany’s final day was pretty much a mirror image of yesterday’s running with Daniel. We began with a lot of pit stop practice, which again went very smoothly, so that kept us from proper running until around 11.
“After that we did some more aero work and short runs until lunch and then we completed a race simulation. We had a small niggle later in the afternoon that kept us in the garage for a little while, but overall it was a successful as yesterday, with Dany just 14 laps shy of Daniel [Ricciardo]’s Wednesday total.”
Rocquelin later went on to reiterate the comments on the team waiting to find their position amongst the teams: “In terms of performance there were some guys out there chasing a lap time today, which was interesting, but all through these tests we have just been focusing on getting well prepared for Australia, so we’re still a little in the dark as to where we are in terms of performance, but we’ll find out soon enough.”
Daniel Ricciardo takes over from Kvyat for the final day of pre-season testing before the RB12 travels to Australia for the first race of the season.
Comments.
Loading comments…