F1 News
Hamilton elated after winter testing: 'I can't wait to go racing again'
The F1 winter test in Bahrain was different from previous years, with changeable weather conditions making it difficult to draw clear conclusions. Charles Leclerc, Lewis Hamilton and Fred Vasseur look back at how the test days went for Ferrari.
Leclerc: 'Lots of uncertainties'
"This has been a very different type of pre-season testing, because of the inconsistent weather in Bahrain," Leclerc began. "The wind changed from run to run, there was even some rain yesterday, and temperatures fluctuated over the course of the week, so all the teams head to the first race with some more unknowns compared to the past few years."
He continued: "We still learned a huge amount, especially in terms of the way the car feels now that we’ve actually been out on track. We will return to Maranello and spend some time in the simulator, to look for the last details that could make a difference in Melbourne, but also to correlate the feeling in the sim to that in the real car. We are fully focused on maximizing our performance over the coming week and I really look forward to kicking off the season."
Hamilton raving: 'Can't wait to race'
Hamilton points to the valuable data collected by his new F1 team, despite being able to cover fewer miles than planned on the final day of testing. "Overall it’s been a great few days and we’ve made some strong progress as a team. We had to finish a little earlier than planned today, and the weather has been hard to predict all week, but that’s how testing works sometimes," he stressed.
"We’ve managed to gather a lot of good information to build on before the season starts. The whole team has done an incredible job and I’m so excited to get to the first race in Melbourne. I can’t wait to go racing with them," concluded the seven-time world champion.
Vasseur: 'We want to fight for both championships'
Team boss Fred Vasseur endorses his drivers' words. "It has been hard to get a clear read on the overall situation here in Bahrain as the conditions were changing quite a lot day by day and from the morning to the afternoon, so it was more similar to Vegas than to the Bahrain we usually know," said the 56-year-old Frenchman.
"Over the past six months we have worked very hard on this car and we have made a good improvement but we will have to wait until we are all on track in Melbourne to understand where we are. If we look at the hierarchy of previous years, what we saw here was not the same as in qualifying a week later," he continued.
"We will go from 10-15 degrees on the track to the 45 we will have in Australia, so in Melbourne it will probably be a whole different story. We want to fight for both championships as we know we have two drivers who can do it and the mood in the team is very positive. We will continue to work hard to be ready in two weeks’ time for the start of the season," Vasseur concluded.
This article was written in collaboration with Norberto Mujica.
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