MARCH 1, 2019

Preseason test two, day 4 – By a whisker

Ferrari clearly had the fastest car in the final days of preseason testing the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya. Halfway through the final day of testing Lewis Hamilton was asked what sort of advantage Ferrari had over the rest of the teams.

By Dan Knutson

Ferrari clearly had the fastest car in the final days of preseason testing the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya. Halfway through the final day of testing Lewis Hamilton was asked what sort of advantage Ferrari had over the rest of the teams.

"I think it's potentially half a second," he said. "Something like that, potentially. We will be analysing a lot from this test and there will be some modes that we try to implement. There's not a lot of time hopefully we'll gain a tenth at least just on our understanding of the car."

But later that same day Hamilton posted a lap time a mere 0.003 of a second slower than Sebastian Vettel's fastest lap in his Ferrari.

"Overall, I am pleased with the work we have carried out," Ferrari team principal and managing director Mattia Binotto said. "I am pleased with how the car behaves and it was well balanced at this track. However, we cannot be completely satisfied at the moment as we would like to be faster and more reliable. So there's still a lot to do. These past days have been very intensive and interesting. We are still focusing on our car to understand its limits in terms of performance and reliability."

Hamilton said the last couple of days had been very positive.

"It felt like the changes we were making helped us progress and gave us clear feedback of when we were moving in the right or the wrong direction," he said. "Today, it was nice to feel the car on lighter fuel and to discover it a little better; I really enjoyed the day and got a good feel for the tyres as well. I'm not the biggest fan of testing, as everybody knows, but it has been a positive week overall. Even so, there is still a lot to do and we are not there yet; there are lots of areas that we are working on and we are heading in the right direction."

Valtteri Bottas ended up third, and a third of a second slower than Vettel.

"That's the final day of testing done, next time we'll drive the W10 it will be in Melbourne," the Mercedes driver said. "We've used our time on track here in Barcelona efficiently, learning a lot and improving our performance over the past two weeks. We've also learned that the competition is going to be very, very tough this year, but we're looking forward to the challenge. We need to keep pushing and find more performance if we want to be competitive in Melbourne, but we have a strong team and have made good progress in the last days. We have a few days left to work on the car, so we will give it everything."

Nico Hulkenberg was best of the rest in his Renault.

"I leave Barcelona feeling encouraged after a busy eight days in the car," he said. "We've made good progress as a team from last year in particular on the power unit. Our reliability has been decent, we had a few small issues here and there, but the team dealt with anything like that quite well and still managed a high lap count. We know the competition is extremely tight, but we only want to focus on ourselves."

Daniil Kvyat rounded out the top five in the Toro Rosso,

"We were able to complete many laps, so I think we can be satisfied with the work put into these past two weeks," he said. "We did our homework between the two tests which is important, and that resulted in the car being comfortable to drive by the end of the second week. We tried some new bits and different setup approaches to see how the car would react as it's testing, because trying this during a race weekend would be too risky and time consuming."

A gearbox problem caused Max Verstappen's final day on the track to end early. He only completed 29 laps. But, overall, the Red Bull driver is confident about the upcoming season.

"If we look to the longer runs, it looks all pretty promising," he said. "I'm looking forward to start racing now. I think we have a pretty good package. And also the engine seems to work really well. It can always be better in winter testing but in general, we had a very strong winter test. We did a lot of laps, even though today was maybe not the best. But in general, I've always been doing over 100 laps, so I can be happy with that."

Preseason Test 2

Day 4 lap times

Sebastian Vettel (Ferrari) – 1m16.221s - C5 compound – 110 laps

Lewis Hamilton (Mercedes) – 1m16.224s - C5 compound – 61 laps

Valtteri Bottas (Mercedes) – 1m16.561s - C5 compound – 71 laps

Nico Hulkenberg (Renault) – 1m16.843s - C5 compound – 51 laps

Daniil Kvyat (Toro Rosso) – 1m16.898s - C5 compound – 131 laps

Carlos Sainz (McLaren) – 1m16.913s - C5 compound – 134 laps

Romain Grosjean (Haas) – 1m17.076s - C5 compound - 73 laps

Daniel Ricciardo (Renault) – 1m17.114s - C5 compound - 52 laps

Kimi Raikkonen (Alfa Romeo) - 1m17.239s - C5 compound – 132 laps

Kevin Magnussen (Haas) – 1m17.565s - C5compound – 94 laps

Max Verstappen (Red Bull) – 1m17.709s - (C3) compound - 29 laps

Sergio Perez (Racing Point) – 1m17.791s - C5 compound - 104 laps

Robert Kubica (Williams) – 1m18.993s - C5 compound – 90 laps

(Pirelli has five different compounds of slick tires which range from the hardest C1 to the softest C5.)