Barcelona Testing Day 1


By Sam Cooper
April 30 2007

Today the Vodafone McLaren Mercedes formula one team finished the first day of testing at Barcelona 4th, testing their radical new wing.

Conditions today were sunny and the track was bone dry, perfect conditions for a formula one test, all eleven teams took this opportunity to race their updated cars to attempt to understand them, and to tune their cars into the Spanish circuit.

Much to other peoples supprises, Toyota driver Ralf Schumacher was fastest today by 0.7 seconds to the next fastest person, Ferrari driver Kimi Raikonen. Pedro was one and a half seconds behind the Toyota driver and 8 tenths behind the Ferrari driver. Reports show that McLaren were not aiming for a fast lap time, they were concentrating on reliability and aerodynamic update testing.

Reports now in say that the reason why Ralf was so fast was that he cheated (classic Schumacher genes there then) by skipping the chicane (something that he has done in the past far too many times.

:

All the teams will be testing tomorrow, rain and bad weather is forecast for the tests tomorrow, the test maybe extended to Thursday.

Pos.

Driver

Team

Time

Laps

1

Ralf Schumacher*

Toyota

01:20.479*/ 1:21.983

92

2

Kimi Räikkönen

Ferrari

01:21.195

98

3

Tacuma Sato

Super Aguri

01:21.858

99

4

Pedro de la Rosa

McLaren

01:21.906

101

5

Nick Heidfeld

BMW

01:22.114

74

6

Rubens Barrichello

Honda

01:22.655

132

7

Nelson Piquet jr.

Renault

01:22.763

125

8

Vitantonio Liuzzi

Scuderia Toro Rosso

01:22.771

56

9

David Coulthard

Red Bull

01:22.973

47

10

Adrian Valles

Spyker F1

01:23.343

44

11

Gieldo van der Garde

Spyker F1

01:23.466

37

12

Kazuki Nakajima

Williams

01:24.248

43

 

* denotes that the driver skipped part of the track and the faster time did not count, Ralf is therefore 4th.