Charles on top at the End of Day 7
- Muhammad Humais
- Feb 28, 2019
- 4 min read
It was Charles Leclerc of Scuderia Ferrari who came out on top at the end of Testing Day 7 in Barcelona. The Monegasque driver did an incredible lap of 1m16.231s on the softest compound C5 available.
MORNING
As the session started at 9 AM in the morning, it was Alexander Albon of Toro Rosso who managed to set a lap in 1m16s for the first time in 2019 Testing. He set a lap time of 1m16.882s on the C5 tyres.
Charles Leclerc after some laps set a cracking lap of 1m17.253s on the C2 compound but had he been on the C5 tyres, it would have been a 1m15.453s, some 7 tenths faster than Lewis Hamilton’s last year pole lap.
Behind Charles Leclerc and Alexander Albon was the newly signed McLaren driver Lando Norris who did a 1m17.084s on C5 tyres as well.
Lewis Hamilton of Mercedes, completed 85 laps and set a 1m18.097s on C2 tyres. He was replaced by Valtteri Bottas in the second session of Day 7.
Charles Leclerc spoke to the media during the lunch break. He said, “The car feels comfortable, from day one the balance is pretty nice and it hasn’t changed today, so it’s a positive day,”
“Obviously I think as every team we are not flat out. There’s still some margin, a bit obviously in myself. I still have to learn, I get more comfortable with the car lap after lap and with the car itself, so it’s looking good for now.”
Leclerc couldn’t predict the future now but he did say some positive things about his performance at Ferrari.
“It’s difficult to say. It’s testing. I think we are looking strong at the moment. Whether they are sandbagging more or less or whatsoever we don’t know and we’ll only know in qualifying, but for now we are pretty happy with the job we’re doing.”
“I’m pretty happy about the tests that we’ve done,”
“As I said, the car is solid, I feel pretty comfortable in it. There is still a lot to learn but it’s a good start.”
AFTERNOON
With Charles Leclerc on top of the table at the end of morning session, Hamilton was replaced by Bottas, Hulkenberg by Riccardo and Magnussen by Grosjean.
Charles Leclerc was having an amazing time with his SF90 but with just 30 minutes left in the session, he parked his car at turn 9 and brought a late red flag. Before Charles, it was Lance Stroll who brought the first red flag of the afternoon session at the same spot.
The second red flag was brought out by the Frenchman Pierre Gasly, who lost the control of his car after stepping on the grass at the high-speed turn 9 and lost the car. He had a dangerous crash and he found himself in the barriers.
Gasly said, “I’m fine, a bit shaken, but I made a mistake in Turn 9 and you guys saw what happened,”
“Pretty big crash, one of the biggest crashes I had. Long night for the mechanics, sorry for that.”
“I’m feeling confident. I just made a mistake today, unfortunate.
“I went slightly wide, 10-15 cm and then lost it as I turned in.”
“It was a pretty big impact, but we’ll focus on all the work we’ve done over the four days.
“We have a lot to analyse. We have a good car that we need to make better for Melbourne.”
“We managed to get a lot of laps in the four days of testing, we tested a lot of things, looking a bit more on performance today,” Gasly said.
In the end Gasly said, “I think we learned a lot, now we need to go through all the data, a lot of work to do before Melbourne but overall we’re pretty pleased.”
Romain Grosjean was absent for most of the session because the Haas mechanics had found some issue with the VF-19’s exhaust.
The top three remained unchanged after the lunch break with Charles in top, Albon in second and Norris in third. Gasly set a good lap before the crash, enough to finish 4th on the leaderboard, and Daniel Riccardo finished 5th ahead of his teammate Nico Hulkenberg.
Valtteri Bottas completed 97 laps for Mercedes with 1m18.862s on C3 tyres.
Bottas said, “We have some kind of balance issues we still need to solve, there are many things in the car we can still improve”
"Any obstacle, I think it's possible to overcome. I trust everyone is really making sure that, with the starting point for the season, we're going to be in best possible shape for Melbourne." said Bottas
Kimi Raikkonen of Alfa Romeo was found to be fixing his seat by himself. He posted a video of himself on his Instagram account. Captioned with the message "I didn't go to school for nothing"
Paddy Lowe is still confident that he is the right man to take Williams out of the situation they are involved but he won't be doing it single handed. He said, "Given time, we can turn this team back to its days of former glory."
Classifications at the end of Day 7.
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