Toro Rosso report from day one of the two day Formula 1 Test at Bahrain International Circuit, venue of Sunday’s Bahrain Grand Prix.
Alexander Albon: “The first day of the Bahrain test went quite well, we had to stop for a few hours due to the rain, otherwise it was a pretty successful day. We got as much mileage in as we could, and we were able to complete a few aero tests which will hopefully bring more performance to the car. The job isn’t completely done yet, so we’ll have a busy schedule tomorrow to complete everything we want to test, but it’s looking good! I’m getting more experience in managing the tyres and finding the best way to extract more performance out of them, so it’s been a useful day despite the rain interruption.”
Jonathan Eddolls, Chief Race Engineer: “Today we commenced two days of in-season testing in Bahrain, with Alex testing for us and Dany running the Pirelli car. The last thing we expected to be an issue was the weather, however, that was the biggest limitation today!”
“After the winds and very sandy atmosphere yesterday, combined with overnight rain, the morning started with the track in relatively poor shape. Conditions improved throughout the morning, but we lost four and a half hours in the afternoon because of rain. Although the rain eased up quite early, the light winds, relatively low temperatures, cloud cover and humidity, meant it took a long time to dry.”
“We were eventually able to resume proper running again shortly after 5pm, so the day was split into two quite distinct sections. We began this morning with some aero rake running to improve our understanding of the on-track aero performance of the STR14, after this we moved onto a sequence of mechanical setup work focused on improving overall performance.”
“Over a race weekend with limited time and new tyres, it can be tricky to carry out larger test items and draw firm conclusions, so we were able to back up the results of our testing from the first two races this morning. At the end of the day, we completed a couple of longer runs and focused on tyre understanding and management.”
“The car was reliable throughout, which is positive, but given the limited track time we still have many test items to complete. We’ve moved these test items into tomorrow’s programme, which means it is going to be a very busy day!”
Masamitsu Motohashi, Honda F1 Deputy Technical Director: “This is our first test session since Barcelona before the start of the season. So far we have acquired plenty of data from the first two races, some of which we cannot get from our dyno work and that has increased our understanding of our PU. This test is useful to conform the lessons we have learned from the two race weekends and it will help us optimise our PU calibration for the coming races.”
“Furthermore, as this is a test, we can experiment with a wider range of PU settings than we would during a race weekend and this helps give us a clearer picture of the PU behaviour. It was a shame we lost so much track time because of the rain which we did not really expect in advance, but we still have one more day tomorrow and hopefully, we will be able to do plenty of laps.”