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Red Bull describe first day of testing as being "straight forward" and positive

20:33, 02 Apr 2019

byLouis Shaw

Simon Rennie, Simulator Engineering of Aston Martin Red Bull Racing has admitted that testing was a bit strange today due to the rain. Max Verstappen topped the timing sheet with a time of 1.29.379 and had a good day of testing.

"Today was a little bit of a strange day due to the rain," he said to verstappen.nl. "Tyre choices for testing are made quite a long way in advance and with a limitation on the number of sets to choose from, everyone naturally went without intermediates or extreme wet tyres, as probability suggests there won’t be heavy rain in Bahrain in April, and yet here we are!”

“Still, despite losing about four-and-a-half hours due to the weather, we managed to get through all of the high priority test items on the run plan for today, so I think we can mark it down as a good outing. We focused on taking forward some of the things we learned from the race weekend here in Bahrain and that meant a lot of aero tests, and a few mechanical items as well.”

“To be honest, it was a fairly straightforward day for us, with no reliability woes and a lot of data gathered. Depending on the weather, it will be more of the same tomorrow when Dan Ticktum takes over from Max. Dan has plenty of simulator experience under his belt, so I don’t expect it to take him to too long to get comfortable with the RB15 and hopefully we’ll have another productive day.”