The Marussia F1 Team embarked on its third day of testing at the Circuito de Jerez today, where Max Chilton was back in the car for his second day of running.
After two abbreviated days with the new MR02, the Team were keen to add further mileage to the car, including achieving its first race distance.
This morning, a few difficulties with the on-board electronics gave rise to a slightly broken programme, so the early part of the race distance work was rather stilted as a result of time spent in the garage. The engineers worked well with the Team’s technical partners to resolve these issues to allow a shift of focus towards understanding the mechanical systems of the car.
This afternoon the Team completed the race distance work before heading into a performance programme.
Max Chilton: “I’m really pleased with how my second day in the car has gone and I’m happy to have been able to reveal a little more of the car’s potential. Obviously these are very early days for all of us, but there are some very positive signs and I’m excited about that. The race runs went very well and we’re starting to understand how the 2013 tyres are going to wear. Having completed the long run work we needed to, it was nice to have a new tyre run at the end of the day to explore more of the car’s performance. What we found was very encouraging and this has given the Team a nice boost at this early stage of the MR02’s development.”
John Booth, Team Principal, Marussia F1 Team: “Overall, today has been a much more positive day and we are certainly moving in the right direction. We are less happy with the mileage we are putting on the car, but we can take encouragement from having identified some of the areas for improvement now that we have completed our initial race distance work. As it was Max’s final day in the car this week, we opted to give him a performance programme to work through. We are still a long way from having any kind of optimised set-up on the car and we can see some areas where we need to work on this very early performance package. We look forward to starting to explore some of these tomorrow with Luiz Razia after completing some reliability work in the morning. Credit to Max for another great day’s work. It hasn’t been easy for either driver so far, but Max has responded well. He clearly appreciates the highs and lows which go with testing and he has applied himself well as the Team worked to resolve the teething issues.”