Barcelona pre-season track session: Day 2

Dave Robson, Head of Vehicle Performance: Today has been about pushing the car a little harder and working on the areas we identified yesterday as offering opportunity for improvement. We have made some decent progress and found some new avenues to explore. Although we had a couple of minor issues, which delayed our progress at times during the day, it is good that we have been able to push the car hard enough to find these snags.

As yesterday, both race drivers shared the workload today and both were able to learn from the other. Tomorrow is the final opportunity to exercise the car before we go to Bahrain for the back to back test and race, it should also present us with the first chance to look at the new 2022 wet tyres as Pirelli are planning wet the track tomorrow afternoon. Nicholas Latifi: There were a few more issues today but that is part of what goes with a pre-season track session. The key thing is for us is to gain a better understanding of what limited us today. We were still able to get in a decent amount of mileage and we are continuing to learn more. We have one more day here in Barcelona, which is another opportunity to learn, build more confidence from myself and the car and prepare ourselves for Bahrain.

Alex Albon: Today went pretty smoothly. We had a small hiccup that we were able to resolve fairly quickly, fortunately it didn’t have a big impact on our running and so we still got good mileage in. The FW44 has been behaving well; I’m enjoying driving it and being able to push more as we get to grips with its characteristics. As a team, I’m happy with where we are and the foundations we’re building over these really important days. It’s a good start to the year and I’m looking forward to one final day of running in Barcelona.