‘THE HOT temperatures made it challenging’ on day two of pre-season testing in Bahrain for Mercedes said Lewis Hamilton following the team’s afternoon programme being curtailed owing to an hydraulic failure.
Prior to that, the team completed close to a century of laps, gathering valuable data and adding learnings to yesterday’s running.
Hamilton logged 72 tours of the Bahrain International Circuit across the morning session. The hotter ambient and track temperatures made conditions tricky, with the team focusing on understanding the overall car balance.
Team mate George Russell took over the W14 for the afternoon starting with aero rake work.
Attention switched to balance checks as dusk fell, prior to a planned programme of long runs; Russell using the C3 tyre to set his fastest lap of the day, a 1m33.654s.
With 26 laps under his belt, and 90 minutes left in the session, the aforementioned hydraulic failure ended the team’s day prematurely during Russell’s first long run.
Hamilton said: “It was a difficult morning. The hot temperatures made it challenging with the tyres overheating, as we often see here in Bahrain.
“We got through our run plan though and it was good to get that mileage in. Everyone is working incredibly hard, staying focused, and we’re discovering everything we can about the W14. We’ve got lots of work planned for the final day of pre-season testing tomorrow. “
Andrew Shovlin, Trackside Engineering Director said: “We’ve not had a strong second day; stopping on track with a reliability issue wasn’t great and we have struggled to get the car balanced well across the changing conditions.
“We’ve got some investigations going on to understand why this has been such a challenge today when yesterday it was fairly straight forward.
“That work will continue into the night and no doubt we’ll understand more come the morning. It will be interesting tomorrow to see if we can understand the drop in performance and mitigate the lost track time.”
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