2019 Pre-Season Test 2, Day 4

Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport completes a total of 1,190 laps during pre-season testing

Date:                           Friday, 1 March 2019

Drivers:                       Valtteri Bottas (AM), Lewis Hamilton (PM)

Circuit:                        Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya

Circuit Length:            4.655 km

Laps Completed:         Valtteri 71, Lewis 61, Total 132

Distance Covered:       Valtteri 331 km, Lewis 284 km, Total 614 km

Best Lap Time:             Valtteri 1:16.561, Lewis 1:16.224

On the last day of the 2019 pre-season test, Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport continued to work on the set-up of the W10 and ticked off the last test items of the two-week programme. The team also collected more aerodynamic data before the focus shifted to single-lap performance. Both drivers set their fastest lap times of winter testing today.

• Valtteri was behind the wheel in the morning, gathering aero data and working on qualifying performance
• Lewis took over for the afternoon, also working on qualifying simulations on different compounds running a similar programme to Valtteri
• The Mercedes-AMG F1 W10 EQ Power+ completed a total of 1,190 laps or 5,539 km during winter testing
• Mercedes-Benz Power Units completed 1,518 km today and a total of 11,089 km during the 2019 pre-season test
• Rights-free imagery of the day is available on our media site

Valtteri Bottas

That’s the final day of testing done, next time we’ll drive the W10, it will be in Melbourne. We’ve used our time on track here in Barcelona efficiently, learning a lot and improving our performance over the past two weeks. We’ve also learned that the competition is going to be very, very tough this year, but we’re looking forward to the challenge. We need to keep pushing and find more performance if we want to be competitive in Melbourne, but we have a strong team and have made good progress in the last days. We have a few days left to work on the car, so we will give it everything. I’m looking forward to Melbourne!

Lewis Hamilton

The last couple of days have been very positive: it felt like the changes we were making helped us progress and gave us clear feedback of when we were moving in the right or the wrong direction. Today, it was nice to feel the car on lighter fuel and to discover it a little better; I really enjoyed the day and got a good feel for the tyres as well. I’m not the biggest fan of testing, as everybody knows, but it has been a positive week overall. Even so, there is still a lot to do and we are not there yet; there are lots of areas that we are working on and we are heading in the right direction.

James Allison

It was a nice final day. We’ve waited for a number of days to run on the softer rubber and have a look at the car in its Melbourne spec. We’re reasonably pleased because we had a good balance with both drivers and both set competitive lap times. But we’ve got plenty of work ahead of us before Melbourne. We can look back on eight days of testing where the car has been very reliable, where we’ve made steady progress throughout those two weeks with the performance and the set-up, we’ve run through a huge range of the procedures and tests that we need to complete in order to be ready for the first race of the season. All in all, it’s been a very long, very tiring but successful test.