F1-Blog

Massa quick again

Felipe Massa was again the quickest man at Bahrain with a 1:30.640. The Ferrari is certainly looking the car to beat in the early part of the season, time will tell though as the changes to the front end geometry of the car may cause some setup issues.

Lewis Hamilton was next up with a 1:31.178, showing again that the McLaren is a quick car as well, time will tell if it’s a reliable one as well. The second McLaren was driven by Pedro de la Rosa as Fernando did not take part today.

Kimi was third quickest with a time nearly a second slower than Massa. It’s not been said if he was running a specific development program, or if he had reverted to the older specification aero package.

The news of the day though was Heikki Kovalainen doing 29 laps in the afternoon session. Amazing how springy these youngsters are, a 200mph accident on Tuesday and back in the car today. It seems Heikki was more concerned with getting across how well the team did re-building his car when he said “The mechanics have done a fantastic job to repair the car so quickly, and a big thank you to the team for their efforts. It was important to run again today, and I was focused on getting the jobs done we needed to, to minimise the amount of lost time.”

New boy Lewis Hamilton summed the testing up though with “At some tests we are top, and here Ferrari has been very strong, I think for sure they have a different program to us, we do not know what fuel (load) they are running, you don’t know what fuel we are running, so it’s difficult to say who is quickest. But I think Ferrari and McLaren are the two main competitors for the title.” Quick learner that boy.

Toyota struggled all day with major reliability gremlins. Jarno had an engine and gearbox problems that caused him to only run for 33 laps all day. The second car was piloted by the recovering Ralf Schumacher, he however suffered clutch failures so did not run as much as he was hoping.