Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsMercedes

Rosberg focused on Monaco during test

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Nico Rosberg says his fastest time during the first day of testing at Barcelona came despite a focus on next weekend's Monaco Grand Prix.

Sunday saw Rosberg take his first victory of the season in Spain, while he also ended Lewis Hamilton's run of pole positions during qualifying. Rosberg was again in action at the Circuit de Catalunya on Tuesday as he set the fastest time by over two seconds, and he says the team was focusing on optimising the car for the next race in Monte Carlo.

"We tried a few things for Monaco, because in the last sector of this track there are many slow corners that are useful for that goal, so we did quite a few runs with low fuel and everything went well," Rosberg said.

"We also made the car softer than before, to simulate the conditions we’ll have in Monaco and it was very positive. And we tried new solutions for other races. Today it was important to try new solutions and improve the car, because Ferrari is very close to us and we need to improve."

And Rosberg called on Mercedes not to get complacent having appeared to extend its advantage over Ferrari during the Spanish Grand Prix.

"They were close but, yes, we managed to pull away again and we need to keep going in this direction. It was important to increase the gap and show we can beat them in the development race."

Click here for Tuesday's gallery from testing at the Circuit de Catalunya

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.