Barcelona F1 test two day two
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Yes, McLaren and Red Bull are known for great chassis. But Team Enstone is also pretty adept at car design and made big gains last year.
Look at the times and laps completed today and Red Bull is in a strong position. It should, by rights, be the strongest Renault team. It has a bigger set-up than the works squad and McLaren's in its first year with a new engine partner, so there's more to learn there.
However, it is only testing. McLaren's promised an upgrade for Melbourne that it doesn't have here, and has reliability bugs to work through, so maybe that'll bridge the gap. And Renault's suggesting that it might not be too far off McLaren at the very least.
Raikkonen's reiterated time and again that he's on the grand prix grid because he still enjoys it and he still believes he can be successful. We've not had much on-track evidence to really believe the latter since his Ferrari return - or at least not to the extent his prodigious abilities have been capable of in the past.
However, Kimi's also stressed that a slow start to 2017 didn't help, and made clear how important he felt it was to start this season on the right foot. Ultimately, low mileage is not going to help that. He's going to have to trust Vettel's feedback from today and yesterday and try to maximise the final two days of the test.
Ultimately, last week's lost mileage isn't an enormous setback because everyone else lost time as well. Nonetheless, he'll need to make a swift and full recovery from feeling unwell today to ensure a more significant setback does not occur over the next two days.
Plenty of questions on Red Bull and Renault, our reporters are looking over the queries
Speed trap figures tend to come at the end of the day, but yesterday's were quite interesting. You can view them here.
Live commitments and other sessions have dominated the first day and the half this week but the intention is for us to send Edd Straw to his favourite habit – trackside – later on to get a proper visual update.
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The lesser spotted Formula 1 car in its natural habitat earlier today
Might be some time before people see cars on track again, lunch break or not
While a certain Pole isn't on track, it hasn't stopped the Kubica fanbase coming along
Shark fins have been banned for this year to reduce the effect of having a big advertising hoarding dragged around a racetrack by such a complicated piece of engineering as an F1 car. That has changed things, although there are still fins on the engine covers.
The regulation dimensions need to allow for an engine cover plus a bit extra just in case anyone needed a bigger one. But most teams have gone for the minimum cross section of bodywork in this area and then trimmed the remaining shark fin to the maximum that the regulations allow.
From the side view from car to car there are a few differences in this trim line detail and optimising it depends on how well the airflow that is coming around the headrest/airbox intake attaches itself to the engine cover surface.
Also, how the airflow is managed where the sidepods sweep into the section of bodywork that covers the back of the engine, turbo and gearbox areas will all have an effect on the detail of this trim line. When the car is sliding through a corner in what is called a yaw state, the car is actually travelling at something like three-to-five degrees to the straight ahead. This fin helps direct the airflow, improving the rear wing's performance.
When the car is in yaw, anything that can be done to help the rear wing loads to be consistent will be a driver confidence boost. The last thing the driver wants is a snap oversteer mid-corner - when this happens it can ruin you day very quickly.
Every little helps and this reduced shark fin area is just another of those components that alone does very little. But the sum of them all together and working positively adds up to enough to separate those that have and those that don't.
For example, if the car has a small understeer tendency on supersofts, fitting ultrasofts or even hypersofts might not give you a better lap time, it will just increase the understeer
Fitting softs or even mediums probably will because it will reduce the understeer. The driver can only push that bit extra if the car is well balanced and tyres play a huge role in that.
Ricciardo just gained something like half a second from ultrasofts to hypersofts, so that says to me that his car was a little oversteery with the ultrasofts and the hypersofts fixed that problem and allowed him to push that little bit more.
By: Geoff Creighton
