By Sam Cooper
February 27 2007

With Spains reigning double world champion Fernando Alonso and Britain’s Lewis Hamilton both completed the days testing finishing 3rd and 5th out of 17 runners. Fernando completed a reasonable 96 laps today, with Lewis completing 55 laps of the Bahrain circuit

Although the Woking based squad didn’t finish fastest on the first day they still have two more days to prove themselves as a fast team that has a good chance of winning, if we look into these testing times a lot though, we appear the best of the rest, which isn’t that bad in my opinion!

One of our main rivals Renault suffered a major setback today after finish superstar Hekki Kovalainen crashed heavily into the barriers at turn seven, thus ending his day completely.

So, why are the McLaren team slower than Ferrari could be one two reasons. McLaren may be sandbagging their real pace, possibly by doing long runs to max out their reliability, or so they can get a good feel for how the car performs under long runs in the searing Middle Eastern heat. Ferrari could have been running some new aerodynamic parts to the car, McLaren may have not of brought them to this day of testing, have they got any more parts to run on the car, or is the MP4-22 going to get no better until Melbourne?

Being fastest on testing is one thing, it may boost your teams moral, but completing your days work and getting valuable information from the car is a far greater asset, being reasonably fast (like we are) helps too!

Testing will continue tomorrow (Wednesday)

The Complete days testing will be shown below.

Position	Constructor	Time	Laps
1	Felipe Massa	Ferrari	01:31.260	102
2	Kimi Räikkönen	Ferrari	01:31.590	95
3	Fernando Alonso	McLaren	01:31.851	96
4	Robert Kubica	BMW	01:32.108	74
5	Lewis Hamilton	McLaren	01:32.193	55
6	Giancarlo Fisichella	Renault	01:32.556	82
7	Hekki Kovalainen	Renault	01:32.880	19
8	Frank Montangy	Toyota	01:32.999	37
9	Jarno Trulli	Toyota	01:33.150	64
10	Sebastian Vettel	BMW	01:33.219	34
11	Christian Klien	Honda	01:33.378	90
12	David Coulthard	Red Bull	01:33.526	69
13	Mark Webber	Red Bull	01:33.642	74
14	James Rossiter	Honda	01:33.697	78
15	Takuma Sato	Super Aguri	01:33.813	75
16	Ralf Schumacher	Toyota	01:34.030	36
17	Scott Speed	STR	1:34.137	44

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