Webber fastest in wet and windy Barcelona on first day of final preseason testing

The final pre-season test kicked off today at Barcelona’s Circuit de Catalunya and, as widely predicted, the weather played a major part in proceedings. Starting on a damp track the morning session was given over to running on intermediate and full wet tyres as overnight wet weather turned into heavy rain before lunch. The downpours abated after the break, however, and Mark Webber was able to put in the day’s fastest lap just before the end of the session. Afterwards, Mark admitted that the rain hadn’t been the only difficulty, with strong winds also making running tricky.

“It was pretty heavy, I must say. There was a big tailwind down to Turn One,” he said. “And in other sections it was pretty dusty. The level of wind wasn’t trivial but to be honest it was tricky enough anyway because of the greasy conditions on the track. We only got one hour at the end of the day in more stable conditions. We opted to put on a couple of sets of tyres at the end and see how it went and it was OK. We’ve still got more to come, but that was the most we could get done in a short limited programme in dry conditions at the end of the day.”

Thursday 28 February 2013
Driver: Mark Webber
Car: RB9
Laps: 90 laps
Best time: 1:22.693
Circuit length: 4.655km
Fastest lap: M. Webber (1:22.693)

Race Engineering Co-ordinator Andy Damerum said: “We’re pretty pleased with how it went today, especially after the start to the session. It rained overnight and the track was quite damp this morning. That obviously forced us to adapt the run plan a bit, but we did get a lot of mileage on the full wet tyres, which was very good, as we didn’t run those last week. In terms of what we went through, it was mostly just mechanical and set-up work. Overall, a good day and now we’ll have to see what the weather has in store for us tomorrow when Seb will be driving.”

Infiniti Red Bull Racing