McLaren moved to play down concerns after it suffered a disrupted day of running at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya on Tuesday.
Stoffel Vandoorne suffered a loss of electrical power on his installation lap and had to be pushed back to McLaren’s garage, and the same issue affected his next run.
Vandoorne came to a halt on track after just three laps and McLaren elected to swap the battery in his MCL33, consigning him to the garage for almost three hours.
Vandoorne carried out running following the lunch break but stopped on track once more midway through the afternoon session, this time due to a suspected hydraulic leak, prematurely ending his day.
As a result, Vandoorne finished ahead of only Lance Stroll on the timesheets and amassed a mere 38 laps, compared to the 171 managed by Ferrari, and 177 completed by Mercedes.
“Today wasn’t the day we had hoped for on track, but, despite this, we aren’t overly concerned about the issues that we’ve faced today,” said Racing Director Eric Boullier.
“It’s obviously not the productive day we had planned, but the problems – a battery issue and a hydraulic leak – are the types of niggles that we almost hope and expect to face during testing, in order to prepare us properly for the season ahead.
“We are here to test, and today is what sometimes happens in testing.
“It’s not ideal, and we would have liked more track time, but we’re working on it, we’re learning from it, and we’ll return to the track tomorrow armed with more information.”
Vandoorne added: “The kinds of issue we’ve had weren’t particularly serious, but have taken a relatively long time to fix, so we weren’t able to run as much as we planned.
“The conditions this afternoon were quite tricky due to the wind, so the running we did wasn’t so representative.”
Discussion about this post