F1-Blog

Want to get your head around the colour’s and designs that the drivers are going to be wearing?

If so pop over to F1 and Stuff around it’s drivers helmet roundup. He has some nice pictures of all the helmets for this years F1 lineup.

Today was the last day of testing at Bahrain, and the last official day of testing for the teams before the opening race in Australia.

Massa was once again the fastest man on the track, he lapped in an incredible 1m29.989s to set the fastest time all week with the new aero package on the car.

Renault had a bit of a hit and miss day. Heikki showed that the team have certainly started to find pace in the car by lapping the second fastest time with a 1m30.384s and Fisi doing a 1m30.498s. That however was not the whole story as both cars had failures that caused less track time than the team were hoping for.

Kimi was running the revised aero package from Massa’s car in the afternoon and managed to get himself into fourth spot.

The McLaren cars both seemed a little off the pace of previous days, Alonso managed fifth and de la Rossa managed seventh.

Barrichello in the Honda showed a better turn of speed as well recording a best time of 1m31.067s to claim sixth spot, however Button only managed fourteenth.

The surprise of the day though was the speed of Scott Speed. He managed a 1m31.500s to claim the eighth spot and showed that the Toro Rosso team seem to have a better handle on the new Adrian Newey car than their A team brothers. Could this indicate that the car was initially designed with the Ferrari V8 in mind instead of the Renault one? Time will tell if that is the case.

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.