2009 STARTS HERE
- 21 May 2013
2009? 2009????? I can here you ranting about me being insane from here. But yes, testing for 2009 kicked off at Jerez yesterday when F1 cars ran on slick tyres for the first time since the European Grand Prix at the same circuit in 1997.
Bridgestone have supplied all teams with three sets of slicks to evaluate in preparation for the replacement of the grooved tyres and return to slicks in 2009.
Only three drivers used the prototype slicks on day one of testing and even this early in the development cycle they have proved to be worth at least a second a lap around Jerez.
Nick Heidfeld in the BMW Sauber ended up with the fastest time of the day with a 1’19.042 followed by Button in the Honda in 1’19.155. Both were on the slick tyres. The fastest runner on the current grooved tyres was McLaren’s Pedro de la Rosa who set a best time of 1’19.712. Heidfeld’s performance would suggest an improvement of about a second per lap. BMW Sauber were usually about 0.7 of a second behind the McLarens and Ferraris during last season and he finished the day 0.7 seconds up on de la Rosa’s McLaren. Admittedly de la Rosa in not a Hamilton or Alonso but even so, Pedro still finished up three tenths quicker than newly crowned world champ Raikkonen in the Ferrari, so he wasn’t tooling around. The greater leap forward, giving rise to suggestions that the improvement in lap times may be far greater than Heidfeld’s time suggested, was that by Button in the Honda. Hondas were usually about two full seconds off the front running pace last year so when Button ends up half a second faster than the McLarens & Ferraris eyebrows waste no time in shooting skywards.
Button’s time suggests that the difference may be as large as two to two and a half seconds per lap. Early logic would put the improvement somewhere in the middle of these but it will be interesting to see, over the next two days, what the improvement is when the heavy hitters, Hamilton, Raikkonen and Schumacher give the top cars a run.
In other news of note, Nico Hulkenberg had his first run in a F1 car and immediately outpaced his Williams team-mate, newly signed race driver, Kazuki Nakajima. Both had a relatively restricted programme with Nico completing just 28 laps and Nakajima 33. Hulkenberg ended up 3/100ths faster on the day.
Other debuts included Timo Glock, who had his first run in the Toyota setting 13th best time, and BMW Sauber rookies Marco Asmer who easily outpaced Javier Villa.
Giancarlo Fisichella also outpaced Franck Montagny in what is becoming a high powered shoot out for the second Force-India seat. Ralf Schumacher and Vitantonio Liuzzi will be joining that fray later in the test.
In Red Bull land, Sebastien Bourdais was comfortably half a second faster than his Toro-Rosso team-mate Vettel and even pipped Red Bull man Mark Webber by 7/100ths. The Red Bull/Toro Rosso cars finished 6th, 8th and 11th, firmly towards the top of the mid-field which is where they ended the season. Bourdais was just 3/10ths behind Piquet, 5th quickest in the Renault who was a similar margin behind Raikkonen’s Ferrari.
Sam Snape
5/12/2007