Team Lotus debuted their 2011 car on-track on Wednesday after opting to skip the first day in Valencia, to instead conduct some promotional filming this coming Friday.
Heikki Kovalainen was given the honour of driving the T128 first. The Finn managed just 15 laps after encountering some reliability issues, but he immediately gave the car the thumbs up.
“Despite the limited running today the car felt fantastic. It immediately felt like it was much better balanced than last year’s car and the grip level felt ok, but it’s a bit hard to make any real judgements as we weren’t going for performance,” said the 29-year-old.
“Today was basically our shakedown and we managed to get through most of the checks we’d aimed to – it wasn’t about pushing today, it was about checking the systems and making sure the new engine, gearbox and hydraulics are all working as we want them to. The whole team has had a very busy winter and everybody has been working flat out to make sure we could be at the first test of the season which wasn’t the case last year.
“This morning we were the first car out on track and that’s been the story all winter – we’ve hit all our targets and it was the same today.”
The teams chief technical officer Mike Gascoyne explained the reason behind the limited running.
“Firstly it was great to get the car out on track on time and I want to thank the whole team for pushing hard to get us to this point.
“However, it was a bit of a frustrating day as we had a problem with the power steering that brought the session to an earlier end than we would have liked. On stripdown we have been able to identify the problem and it is a very straightforward fix so we will get the parts and spares here for tomorrow and should be able to run through the whole program.
“On the positive side we did all the systems and temperature checks and everything appears to be running fine so with the power steering issue fixed overnight I am sure we will have two full days of testing to come.”
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