George and Kimi Add Lots More Mileage on Second Day of Barcelona Shakedown

The team completed its second of three days of running at the Barcelona Shakedown today (28January) having opted not to run on Tuesday due to the wet weather.

George drove the W17 in the morning completing 92 laps, predominantly on the C1 Hard tyre. That takes his total for the week to 187 laps thus far.

Kimi jumped into the car for the afternoon and ran a similar programme as George; he logged 91 laps adding to the 56 laps he achieved on Monday.

Combined, the team logged 183 laps on Wednesday and just over 850km of mileage. That takes the team to a total of 334 laps for the week and over 1,500km of running.

The team now has the choice of completing its third and final day on track either Thursday or Friday to round out the Barcelona Shakedown.

George Russell

Everything went relatively smoothly from a reliability perspective today so that is good for our overall programme. This test is all about getting mileage on the car and making sure everything functions as it should. That was the case today as Kimi and myself were able to put a large number of laps in once again. The track temperature was in the low single-digits this morning, one of the coldest circuits I’ve ever driven on, so there’s little-to-nothing you can read into the times. The excitement lies ahead once we head to Melbourne and get a sense of where we stack up against our competitors. For now, we are putting in the hard work and enjoying the process of getting ready for the season ahead.

We’ve still got one more day of running we can accomplish, which may be tomorrow but will depend on the weather. We’ve got more work we want to do, and we are in a good place to run on Thursday, but we will only do so if we are confident it will be dry.

Kimi Antonelli

It was a better day on my side than Monday, where the wet track in the morning limited my running. We were able to run a full race distance this afternoon, building our mileage and getting lots of data for the team to work with. This car is completely new and a big difference to last year’s so I’m getting more used to it with every lap we complete. It’s constant learning for me as a driver and the team too so accumulating as much mileage as we can is very useful.

We have completed our programme on both days so far. That is the only real goal of this shakedown and hopefully our third and final day of running goes smoothly. That may be tomorrow if the weather looks to be dry; whatever the conditions we face either tomorrow or Friday though, we are focused on adding to our mileage and putting ourselves in the best possible position before we head to Bahrain.

Andrew Shovlin, Trackside Engineering Director

We are pleased with the mileage we achieved today and have ticked off most of the objectives we set ourselves for the first two days of running here in Barcelona. The car has been reliable, and we’ve been able to put together multiple race distances today. That is encouraging as an initial step, and I know both drivers will be feeling the number of laps they put in today!

The drivers have commented favourably on the feeling these smaller, lighter cars give them compared to the previous generation. However, they will only be truly happy once we see the relative performance compared to our competitors and that is something we won’t see until Bahrain at the earliest. We have one more day of running where we will get into a little bit more set-up work than we have so far. That may come tomorrow and will give us more useful information we can analyse before we head to Bahrain. If that final day goes as well as these first two days have then we will be happy with how this shakedown in Barcelona has gone.