Tuesday, 3 February 2015

Early engine change hampers Red Bull and Ricciardo on day 3 in Jerez

Photo
(Infiniti Red Bull Racing)

Daniel Ricciardo was back behind the wheel of the Infiniti Red Bull Racing RB11 for day three of winter testing at the Jerez circuit.

It was a tough start the day for the Australian however as the team discovered a problem and elected to change his Renault power unit which resulted in a limited programme for the day. Following the power unit change, Ricciardo was able to get back out on track to carry out a number of long runs for the Milton Keynes based outfit.

The Australian completed 48 laps in total on Tuesday setting the seventh fastest time of the day with a 1m 23.901s. Speaking at the end of the day Ricciardo stated:

Although we were limited with running today, we got some long runs together and that was encouraging, I was happy to do some 10-15 lap runs as that’s always where you get a better understanding of the car.

Every lap we do we understand something more about the car or the driveablility of the Renault power unit. So it was a decent afternoon. In terms of where we’re at, it’s impossible to know about the pace because we don’t know what people are running, but I think the consistency today was good, we put a few laps together in the end, so a few positives to take away from today.

The Milton Keynes based outfit’s Head of Race Engineering Guillaume Rocquelin commented by saying:

A day of two halves really. The engine issue arrived very early – I think Daniel had about five laps on the board at that point. We knew what the issue was and so we decided to change the power unit and that took some time.

However, when we got Daniel back out the car ran without any problems and we were able to put together a couple of longer runs, which were good. In the end we managed a decent total of laps given the restricted running and we’re happy with how the car performed.

Daniil Kvyat will conclude the Jerez test programme in the RB11 on Wednesday.

© Ben Johnston 2015





No comments:

Post a Comment