The Lotus F1 Team has pulled out of the second pre-season test in Barcelona altogether after discovering an issue with their chassis construction.
The outfit abandoned Tuesday’s running after just seven laps when Romain Grosjean reported that the car felt unusual. “I was very quickly aware that the car wasn’t responding as it should,” said the Frenchman.
The team had planned to fly its Jerez chassis out and continue testing on Wednesday, but they believe it too will require modifications after conducting tests back at their Enstone factory in which they believe the high-speed Catalunya circuit highlighted the issue.
Technical director James Allison explained the issue: “Before we were due to fly chassis E20-01 out to Barcelona in replacement of chassis E20-02 – damaged this morning – we ran a series of simulations at the factory based on the data provided by our brief running on track today.
“As a result, we were able to identify an area which requires some additional work. It will be more productive for us to carry out these modifications to both chassis at Enstone rather than send E20-01 out to this week’s test. We’ll put the right measures in place and we will be able to fix the problem before next week.”
Team principal Eric Boullier said the decision to pull out of the test completely was a difficult one, but he and the team felt it was the right decision.
“Not running this week has been a tough decision to take, but we feel that our choice is the right one. On the positive side, we have quickly identified the issue with the chassis and our design office has already devised a solution. We will be present at next week’s test in Barcelona,” he said.
“We draw faith from the fact that the E20 was quick out of the box in Jerez and showed its reliability there. We have a lot of work ahead of us over the next week but everyone at Enstone is ready for this challenge.”
