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The second day of Formula 1 testing at Barcelona was book-ended by red flags caused by Red Bull, though one incident was more severe than the other.
Max Verstappen got his first taste of Red Bull’s RB22 on Tuesday and immediately slid through the gravel with it on his outlap.
That caused a brief red flag and the Red Bull was in the garage for a while after, then it rained later in the morning, so Verstappen only got a limited number of laps in the dry.
It was enough to set the pace on the day, with a 1m19.578s ahead of Charles Leclerc, although this was 1.4s slower than team-mate Isack Hadjar’s Monday best.
Hadjar and Lewis Hamilton took over their respective cars in the afternoon but ran in the rain so their times were a long way off.
Day two testing times
1 Verstappen (Red Bull) 1m19.578s - 27 laps
2 Leclerc (Ferrari) 1m20.844s - 66 laps
3 Hadjar (Red Bull) 1m31.891s - 42 laps
4 Hamilton (Ferrari) 1m32.872s - 57 laps
Team lap totals
Ferrari - 123 laps
Red Bull - 69 laps
Ferrari hits the ground running
After a 15km shakedown at Fiorano last week, Ferrari always intended to get stuck into this test on day two.
The rain was not ideal but it didn’t deter Ferrari from running. A very productive day, with both drivers getting behind the wheel, meant the team cleared 100 laps despite the conditions.
It wasn’t nearly as eye-catching as customer team Haas’s 154-lap effort on day one but it underlined Ferrari’s good early reliability with its new engine.
Leclerc said: “Obviously being the first morning, we've gone through the very first preliminary check of the of the car, which everything went properly, and little by little, we'll just go through our checklist of the first systems to then eventually what matters most, which is performance.
“But this will come probably a bit later on in those three days, and trying to understand, first how everything behaves, and then see how it goes.”
Hamilton’s running was split between using intermediate and wet tyres and he had a small off as the rain intensified.
Ferrari’s head of track engineering Matteo Togninalli called it a “productive day” considering the conditions.
“Despite the rain, we completed solid mileage and, most importantly, had no major reliability issues, which is the key priority with a new car and power unit,” he said.
Red Bull’s dream start sours
Monday could not have gone better for Red Bull. Tuesday was a bump back down to earth.
Verstappen’s curtailed running in the morning meant the four-time world champion barely scratched the surface of learning the car and engine. And it deprived Red Bull important mileage in understanding both.
But Hadjar’s shunt was (literally) more damaging.
Red Bull team boss Laurent Mekies said it was unclear when the car could be repaired to run again this week. He even hinted Red Bull might not be able to fix the damage at the track when he said the team would “try to”.
You would think Red Bull must be fine on spares, otherwise it would have been more cautious about running a lot in the wet, but once it committed to starting its day it was also caught with trying to make the best of it.
Teams use up one of their three permitted days the moment they leave the pits. So even though the dry running was compromised and the afternoon was wet, Red Bull would have wasted a day being conservative.
Hopefully there are enough spares for it to conclude its programme normally, but that is presumably Hadjar’s first test over given he had a day to himself already. So it ended negatively after claiming on Monday he couldn’t have prepared better and he’d had a “very good first day”.
McLaren pushes debut to Wednesday
McLaren did not join Ferrari in making its test debut on Tuesday, opting instead to push it to Wednesday.
This was always an option the team had in mind for its MCL40, as a Wednesday start still allows McLaren to maximise its three-day allowance for the week.
And though it puts a little bit of pressure on McLaren to maximise each of the days, with no ‘time off’ between to go over data or address issues, the later start has conversely allowed it to be better prepared for its first track running.
Wednesday will mark the MCL40’s shakedown as it has not run prior to this week’s test.
“We plan to run on track for the final three days of testing, while the opening days have provided an important opportunity for the full car to be assembled and checked,” McLaren said.
Which teams didn’t return
Red Bull was the only team from Monday to reappear immediately on Tuesday.
The rest opted to wait, and will have different reasons for that.
Audi and Cadillac had issues to resolve on Monday so it made sense to take their time with that and not rush back on track too soon.
But others saw the forecast for rain and decided it was best to wait. The forecast is better over the remainder of the week and now they have flexibility of which two days to run out of Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.
As long as the weather holds up, that will likely turn out to be more productive than had they got on track Tuesday.
