Vitaly Petrov: “It’s great to come back for the new season and try the R31 for the first time. It was not the perfect day because we had some mechanical problems and we lost a little bit of time, so we did not do many laps. But we did manage to check a lot of systems on the car, which was important for us and it looks like everything is working well. I tried KERS for the first time and it will take me a while to get used to it because it’s clear the driver will be quite busy in the cockpit this year. I also tried out the Pirellis, but it was difficult for me to learn too much because we were not pushing too hard and we mostly did in and out laps.”
Eric Boullier: “It’s obviously exciting to be back at the track after a long winter and to see the R31 complete its first few laps. It’s still very early days and the car did not run a lot today, so there was a little bit of frustration for Vitaly because he would have liked to get more miles under his belt. But this is to be expected at the first test, which is basically more of a shakedown for the car and the time to check reliability to make sure everything is working as we expected. For the remaining two days our focus will be on validating the systems and collecting data so that we can get down to performance work at the remaining tests.”
James Allison: “Some mechanical niggles with the car meant that we spent more time in the garage today that we would have liked. As a consequence our day became more of a shakedown of all the new systems than an opportunity to explore performance. We learned that the car runs comfortably within our design temperature limits and we gained some useful running on both the new DCS rear wing and the KERS. The next days of testing should bring us a better idea of the performance of the car.”
